We children accepted it like that, for we were not used to anything else, and where we lived in such isolation in a bare and harsh world, it was necessary to be cautious but, looking back now, I have to wonder whether her reaction had not been extreme, driven by that familiar stubbornness. Why else do I remember so few visitors from my childhood and did I get the feeling later that people from the district avoided our house; why did they have to be lured with such difficulty to attend the dance when Jakob was married and again, years later, the dance when Maans came of age? The Roggeveld was sparsely populated and the roads were bad, so that not many people paid social visits, but travellers between the Karoo and the Roggeveld, the Karoo and the Hantam, over Vloksberg, passed quite close to us; why did so few of them stop there in those years unless they were forced to come and fill their water barrels? Did they notice that the hospitality shown them was duty-bound and guarded, and that every morsel they ate and every stub of candle that had to be lit for them were noted and every barrel of water was conceded with ill-concealed reluctance? — by Mother, I have to add, not by Father; never by Father. When neighbours rode over for advice or help, they were likewise not encouraged to stay, and I cannot remember the wives often accompanying their husbands to call on Mother: they, too, would soon have discovered that their arrival was greeted without warmth and that no effort was made to delay their departure; they, too, would have felt the reserve and lack of cordiality with which Mother usually received outsiders, and in the increasingly uncomfortable silence around the big table in the voorhuis they would have realised that every spoonful of tea was being measured out unwillingly and every lump of sugar they used was resented. For as much as the people of our district called on each other, we had no part in their social interaction, and the gatherings on neighbouring farms were seldom attended by us. Only later did things start to change, when Maans came of age and got married, when the town house was built, and when Mother took her seat among the wives of the elders in the front row at church, to hold it until her death. All that, though, was much later.
It was because of Mother, always Mother, never Father. He was not a greedy or close-fisted person, but always willing to help. He liked company, even though he never said much himself, and over a glass of brandy he could even become jovial in his unassuming way; but his path was mapped out for him like everybody else’s, and usually he followed it resignedly. Only once or twice did I see him turn pale with suppressed anger and Mother yield to him without his having to raise his voice or even say much. She was the one who struggled to make ends meet and who saved so doggedly — do I exaggerate when I say anxiously, as if she were trying desperately to protect us from some danger only she was aware of, and no effort were too great to ward off the lurking danger? Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but not entirely. Perhaps it was the memory of a bitter and hungry youth that drove her to try and establish for herself safety and security, and fear was indeed interwoven with that memory. I do not know, I can only try, and cannot even say whether my efforts make sense — Oom Koos’s incidental remark after her funeral and Oom Ruben’s unexpected visit and that anxious scrimping and saving, these are the only means at my disposal. As a child on the farm I often played on my own near the old graveyard beyond the ridge where the old people had thrown out everything they had no further need of and among the stones I gathered shards of pottery and china or bits of blue or purplish glass. Sometimes, however, there were larger pieces among the fragments, just large enough to be able to make out something of the form or pattern of the original cup or bowl from the round shape or the ornamentation; and just so I have only the fragments of my memories from which I now have to try and recover the form and pattern of the past.
It was a lonely youth, though I was never aware of it myself, and furthermore I was the youngest child and only daughter. Between Jakob and Pieter, and again between Pieter and myself, there had been other children who had died, and only the inscriptions in the family Bible and the nameless stone mounds in the graveyard bore testimony to them, and only the three of us had survived. Jakob was the eldest son who always had to take responsibility and he was favoured slightly by Mother, as far as she ever showed any sign of favour or affection, so that there was a distance between him and me, regardless of that caused by the age difference and, besides, Jakob was a reserved and uncommunicative person. I was only a child when he died, and thus he remains scarcely more than a dark, silent figure on the fringe of my childhood world. “Blink Jakob” they called him, I remember now, and long after his death people who had known him sometimes still spoke of “Blink Jakob”. Contemptuously or admiringly, or perhaps both? I cannot say, neither do I know the origin of the nickname, but later they referred to him as a handsome man, and in her old age, on several occasions when Mother spoke of him to strangers, she also mentioned with a certain smugness that he had been a handsome man. Do I remember more, or is it only the memory of the nickname that conjures up further images: can I really remember something about a sleek horse, a gleaming black stallion I had feared as a child? That could have been the horse on which he used to ride through the kloof in the evenings, to Oom Wessel’s farm in the Karoo; or perhaps it is only my imagination. I was no more than a child when he died, ten or twelve years old.
Oh yes, and that he had inherited Mother’s impetuous nature and her fierce temper, that I still remember. Could that be why people smiled to themselves at the thought of “Blink Jakob”? He would lose his temper in a flash and was a hard master to the farm-hands, so that he was not well-loved by any of them. Perhaps he took after Mother’s people, and that might have been why she was sometimes partial to him and understood him best.
And Pieter — yes, Pieter was a different kind of person. Actually I never got to know Pieter much better than Jakob, for I lost both my brothers at an early age, when I was still a child, but between Pieter and me there was not such an age difference, and he had more time for his little sister than could be expected of an older brother. Sometimes he would make me little toys and even play with me when he was not being put to work on the farm. Pieter was more like Father’s people, smaller and slimmer than Jakob, with fair hair and blue eyes, and he was also more cheerful, had a quicker tongue and a livelier imagination, and was inclined to joke and tease: Pieter singing to himself while he worked, Pieter playing an old violin, or laughing on the dance floor in a haze of candlelight and fine, powdery dust. Why do I remember this now after all the years, why does that image present itself so unexpectedly? “Oh, but he could dance well!” Hesther Vlok, by then a middle-aged woman, once sighed, and it must have been her own memories that caused her to smile like that, for she was older than me and she might have been one of his dance partners. Pieter nimble and lean on the dance floor — it must have been at New Year, the dance I remember, when Sofie came to us as a bride and there was dancing. Pieter with his slim white body gripping the sheaves on the wagon, Pieter’s face at the window in the moonlight, Pieter’s face by the flickering light of a candle, Pieter running through the veld, laughing, running through fields of flowers in spring, stopping, his hair blowing in the wind. Later he never laughed or even smiled any more, irrevocably withdrawn in his silence, so that no one could still say what he was thinking or remembering.