J.M. Coetzee

In the Heart of the Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an ostrich-plume waving on its forehead, dusty after the long haul. Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also possible. My father wore his black swallowtail coat and stovepipe hat, his bride a wide-brimmed sunhat and a white dress tight at waist and throat. More detail I cannot give unless I begin to embroider, for I was not watching. I was in my room, in the emerald semi-dark of the shuttered late afternoon, reading a book or, more likely, supine with a damp towel over my eyes fighting a migraine. I am the one who stays in her room reading or writing or fighting migraines. The colonies are full of girls like that, but none, I think, so extreme as I. My father is the one who paces the floorboards back and forth, back and forth In his slow black boots. And then, for a third, there is the new wife, who lies late abed. Those are the antagonists.

            2. The new wife. The new wife is a lazy big-boned voluptuous feline woman with a wide slow-smiling mouth. Her eyes are black and shrewd like two berries, two shrewd black berries. She is a big woman with fine wrists and long plump tapering fingers. She eats her food with relish. She sleeps and eats and lazes. She sticks out her long red tongue and licks the sweet mutton-fat, from her lips. "Ah, I like that!" she says, and smiles and rolls her eyes. I watch her mouth, mesmerized. Then she turns on me the wide smiling mouth and the shrewd, black eyes. I cannot easily sustain her smile. We are not a happy family together.

            3. She is the new wife, therefore the old one is dead. The old wife was my mother, but died so many years ago that I barely recall her. I must have been very young when she died, perhaps only a newborn babe. From one of the farthest oubliettes of memory I extract a faint grey image, the image of a faint grey frail gentle loving mother huddled on the floor, one such as any girl in my position would be likely to make up for herself.

            4. My father's first wife, my mother, was a frail gentle loving woman who lived and died under her husband's thumb. Her husband never forgave her for failing to bear him a son. His relentless sexual demands led to her death in childbirth. She was too frail and gentle to give birth to the rough rude boy-heir my father wanted, therefore she died. The doctor came too late. Summoned by a messenger on a bicycle, he had to come trundling along forty miles of farm-track in his donkey-cart. When he arrived my mother already lay composed on her deathbed, patient, bloodless, apologetic.

            5. (But why did he not come on horseback? But were there bicycles in those days?)

            6. I was not watching my father bear his bride home across the flats because I was in my room in the dark west wing eating my heart out and biding my time. I should have been standing ready to greet them with smiles and offers of tea, but I was not. I was absent. I was not missed. My father pays no attention to my absence. To my father I have been an absence all my life. Therefore instead of being the womanly warmth at the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors, neglected, vengeful.

            7. Night falls, and my father and his new wife cavort in the bedroom. Hand in hand they stroke her womb, watching for it to flicker and blossom. They twine; she laps him in her flesh; they chuckle and moan. These are fair times for them.

            8. In a house shaped by destiny like an H I have lived all my life, in a theatre of stone and sun fenced in with miles of wire, spinning my trail from room to room, looming over the servants, the grim, widow-daughter of the dark father. Sundown after sundown, we have faced each other over the mutton, the potatoes, the pumpkin, dull food cooked by dull hands. Is it possible that we spoke? No, we could not have spoken, we must have fronted each other in silence and chewed our way through, time, our eyes, his black eyes and my black eyes inherited from him, roaming blank across their fields of vision. Then, we have retired to sleep, to dream allegories of baulked desire such, as we are blessedly unfitted to interpret; and in the mornings vied in icy asceticism to be the earlier afoot, to lay the fire in the cold grate. Life on the farm.

            9. In the shadowy hallway the clock ticks away day and night. I am the one who keeps it wound and who weekly, from sun and almanac, corrects it. Time on the farm is the time of the wide world, neither a jot nor a tittle more or less, Resolutely I beat down the blind, subjective time of the heart, with its spurts of excitement and drags of tedium: my pulse will throb with the steady one-second beat of civilization. One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds. But will he ever know the desolation of the hour of the siesta, chiming in cool green high-ceilinged houses where the daughters of the colonies lie counting with their eyes shut? The land is full of melancholy spinsters like me, lost to history, blue as roaches in our ancestral homes, keeping a high shine on the copperware and laying in jam. Wooed when we were little by our masterful fathers, we are bitter vestals, spoiled for life. The childhood rape: someone should study the kernel of truth in this fancy.

            10. I live, I suffer, I am here. With cunning and treachery, if necessary, I fight against becoming one of the forgotten ones of history. I am a spinster with a locked diary but I am more than that. I am an uneasy consciousness but I am more than that, too. When all the lights are out I smile in the dark. My teeth glint, though no one would believe it.

            11. She comes up behind me, a waft of orange-blossom and rut, and takes me by the shoulders. "I do not want you to be angry, I understand that you should feel disturbed and unhappy, but there is no cause for it. I would like us all to be happy together. I will do anything, truly anything, to make that come about. Can you believe me?"

            I stare into the chimney-recess; my nose swells and reddens.

            "I want to make a happy household," she croons, circling, "the three of us together. I want you to think of me as a sister, not an enemy."

            I watch the full lips of this glutted woman.

            12. There was a time when I imagined that if I talked long enough it would be revealed to me what it means to be an angry spinster in the heart of nowhere. But though I sniff at each anecdote like a dog at its doo, I find none of that heady expansion into the as if that marks the beginning of a true double life. Aching to form the words that will translate me into the land of myth and hero, here I am still my dowdy self in a dull summer heat that will not transcend itself. What do I lack? I weep and gnash my teeth. Is it mere passion? Is it merely a vision of a second existence passionate enough to carry me from the mundane of being into the doubleness of signification? Do I not quiver at every pore with a passion of vexation? Is it that my passion lacks will? Am I an angry yet somehow after all complacent farmyard spinster, wrapped in the embrace of my furies? Do I truly wish to get beyond myself? The story of my rage and its dire sequel: am I going to climb into this vehicle and close my eyes and be carried downstream, over the rapids, through the broken water, to wake refreshed on the quiet estuary? What automatism is this, what liberation is it going to bring me, and without liberation what is the point of my story? Do I feel rich outrage at my spinster fate? Who is behind my oppression? You and you, I say, crouching in the cinders, stabbing my finger at father and stepmother. But why have I not run away from them? As long as an elsewhere exists where I can lead a life, there are heavenly fingers pointing at me too. Or am I, hitherto unbeknown to me, but now alas known, reserved for a more complex fate: to be crucified head downward as a warning to those who love their rage and lack all vision of another tale? But what other tale is there for me? Marriage to the neighbour s second son? I am not a happy peasant. I am a miserable black virgin, and my story is my story, even if it is a dull black blind stupid miserable story, ignorant of its meaning and of all its many possible untapped happy variants. I am I. Character is fate. History is God. Pique, pique, pique.

            13. The Angel, that is how she is sometimes known. The Angel in Black who comes to save the children of the brown folk from their croups and fevers. All her household severity is transformed into an unremitting compassion when it comes to the care of the sick. Night after night she sits up with, whimpering children or women in labour, fighting off sleep. "An angel from, heaven!" they say, their flatterers' eyes keen. Her heart sings. In war she would lighten the last hours of the wounded. They would die with smiles on their lips, gazing into her eyes, clasping her hand, Her stores of compassion are boundless. She needs to be needed. With no one to need her she is baffled and bewildered. Does that not explain everything?

            14. If my father had been a weaker man he would have had a better daughter. But he has never needed anything. Enthralled by my need to be needed, I circle him like a moon. Such is my sole risible venture into the psychology of our debacle. To explain is to forgive, to be explained is to be forgiven, but I, I hope and fear, am inexplicable, unforgivable. (Yet what is it in me that shrinks from the light? Do I really have a secret or is this bafflement before myself only a way of mystifying my better, questing half? Do I truly believe that stuffed in a crack between my soft mother and my baby self lies the key to this black bored spinster? Prolong yourself, prolong yourself, that is the whisper I hear in my inmost.)

            15. Another aspect of myself, now that I am talking about myself, is my love of nature, particularly of insect life, of the scurrying purposeful life that goes on around each ball of dung and under every stone. When I was a little girl (weave, weave!) in a frilled sunbonnet I would sit all day in the dust, so the story goes, playing with my friends the beetles, the grey ones and the brown ones and the big black ones whose names I forget but could with no effort turn up in an encyclopedia, and my friends the anteaters who made those elegant little conical sandtraps down whose sides I would tumble the common red ant, and, every now and again, secreted beneath a flat stone, a pale dazed flaccid baby scorpion, whom I would crush with a stick, for even then I knew that scorpions were bad. I have no fear of insects, I leave the homestead behind and walk barefoot up the river bed, the hot dark sand crunching beneath my soles and squeezing out between my toes. In the drifts I sit with spread skirts feeling the warmth mould itself to my thighs. I would have no qualm, I am sure, if it came to the pinch, though how it could come to this pinch I do not know, about living in a mud hut, or indeed under a lean-to of branches, out in the veld, eating chickenfeed, talking to the insects. Even through the little girl the lineaments of the crazy old lady must have glimmered, and the brown folk, who hide behind bushes and know everything, must have chuckled.

            16. I grew up with the servants' children. I spoke like one of them before I learned to speak like this. I played their stick and stone games before I knew I could have a dolls' house with Father and Mother and Peter and Jane asleep in their own beds and clean clothes ready in the chest whose drawers slid in and out while Nan the dog and Felix the cat snoozed before the kitchen coals. With the servants' children I searched the veld for khamma-roots, fed cowsmilk to the orphaned lambs, hung over the gate to watch the sheep dipped and the Christmas pig shot. I smelled the sour recesses where they slept pell-mell like rabbits, I sat at the feet of their blind old grandfather while he whittled clothes-pegs and told his stories of bygone days when men and beasts migrated from winter grazing to summer grazing and lived together on the trail. At the feet of an old man I have drunk in a myth of a past when beast and man and master lived a common life as innocent as the stars in the sky, and I am lax from laughing. How am I to endure the ache of whatever it is that is lost without a dream of a pristine age, tinged perhaps with the violet of melancholy, and a myth of expulsion to interpret my ache to me? And mother, soft scented loving mother who drugged me with milk and slumber in the featherbed and then, to the sound of bells in the night, vanished, leaving me alone among rough hands and hard bodies--where are you? My lost world is a world of men, of cold nights, woodfire, gleaming eyes, and a long tale of dead heroes in a language I have not unlearned.

            17. In this house with rival mistresses the servants go about their duties with hunched shoulders, flinching from the dregs of bad temper that will be flung at them. Bored with drudgery, they look forward to the colour and drama of quarrels, though they know that few things are better for them than amity. The day has not yet come when the giants war among themselves and the dwarves slip away in the night. Feeling all their feelings not successively in waves of contraries but simultaneously as a hotchpotch of rage, regret, resentment, and glee, they experience a giddiness that makes them long to be asleep. They want to be in the big house but they also want to stay at home malingering, dozing on a bench in the shade. Cups fall through their fingers and shatter on the floor. They whisper rapidly in corners. For no good reason they scold their children. They have bad dreams. The psychology of servants.

            18. I live neither alone nor in society but as it were among children. I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations, of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded. Reading the brown folk I grope, as they grope reading me: for they too hear my words only dully, listening for those overtones of the voice, those subtleties of the eyebrows that tell them my true meaning: "Beware, do not cross me." What I say does not come from me. Across valleys of space and time we strain ourselves to catch the pale smoke of each other's signals. That is why my words are not words such as men use to men. Alone in my room with my duties behind me and the lamp steadily burning, I creak into rhythms that are my own, stumble over the rocks of words that I have never heard on another tongue. I create myself in the words that create me. I, who living among the downcast have never beheld myself in the equal regard of another's eye, have never held another in the equal regard of mine. While I am free to be I, nothing is impossible. In the cloister of my room I am the mad hag I am destined to be. My clothes cake with dribble, I hunch and twist, my feet blossom with horny callouses, this prim voice, spinning out sentences without occasion, gaping with boredom because nothing ever happens on the farm, cracks and oozes the peevish loony sentiments that belong to the dead of night when the censor snores, to the crazy hornpipe I dance with myself.

            19. What solace are lapidary paradoxes for the loves of the body? I watch the full lips of the glutted widow, hear the creak of floorboards in the muted farmhouse, the warm murmur from the great bed, feel the balm of loving flesh upon me, sleep away into the steaming body smells. But how to let go the real for the deep darkdown desired? A jagged virgin, I stand in the doorway, naked, asking.

            20. To her full dark lips the glutted widow raises a finger in cryptic gesture. Does she warn me to silence? Does my candid body amuse her? Through the open curtains stream the rays of the full moon on to her shoulders, her full ironical lips. In the shadow of her haunch lies the man asleep. To her mouth she raises a cryptic hand. Is she amused? Is she startled? The night breeze wafts through the parted curtains. The room is in darkness, the sleeping figures so still I cannot hear their breathing above the hammer of my heart; Should I go to them clothed? Are they phantoms who will vanish when I touch them? She watches me with full ironical lips. I drop my clothes at the door. In the glare of the moonlight she goes over my poor beseeching body. I weep, hiding my eyes, wishing for a life story that will wash over me tranquilly as it does for other women.

            21. When he came in hot and dusty after a day's work my father expected that his bath should be ready for him It was my childhood duty to light the fire an hour before sunset so that the hot water could be poured into the enamelled hipbath the moment he stamped through the front door. Then I would retire to the dark side of the floral screen to receive his clothes and lay out the clean underlinen. Tiptoeing out of the bathroom, I would hear the wash of his entry, the sucking of the water under his armpits and between his buttocks, and inhale the sweet damp heavy miasma of soap and sweat. Later this duty ceased; but when I think of male flesh, white, heavy, dumb, whose flesh can it be but his?

            22. Through a chink in the curtain I watch them. Taking his hand, lifting her skirt, she steps down, one-two, from the dog-cart. She stretches her arms, smiling, yawning, a little parasol dangling closed from a gloved finger. He stands behind her. Low words pass. They come up the steps. Her eyes are full and happy, the kind of eyes that do not notice fingers at the lace curtains. Her legs swing easily, at peace with her body. They pass through the door and out of sight, sauntering, a man and a woman come home.

            23. Into, the evening, as the shadows first lengthen, and then cover everything, I stand at the window. Hendrik crosses the yard on his way to the storeroom, The massed twitter of birds in the riverbed rises and wanes. In the last light the swallows swoop to their nest under the eaves and the first bats flit out. From their various lairs the predators emerge, muishond, meerkat. What are pain, jealousy, loneliness doing in the African night? Does a woman, looking through a window into the dark mean anything? I place all ten fingertips on the cool glass. The wound In my chest slides open. If I am an emblem then I am an emblem. I am incomplete, I am a being with a hole inside me. I signify something, I do not know what, I am dumb, I stare out through a sheet of glass into a darkness that is complete, that lives in itself, bats, bushes, predators and all, that does not regard me, that is blind, that does not signify but merely is. If I press harder the glass will break; blood will drip, the cricket-song will stop for a moment and then resume. I live inside a skin inside a house. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me. I am a torrent of sound streaming into the universe, thousands upon thousands of corpuscles weeping, groaning, gnashing their teeth.

            24. They sweat and strain, the farmhouse creaks through the night. Already the seed must have been planted, soon she will be sprawling about in her mindless heat, swelling and ripening, waiting for her little pink pig to knock. Whereas a child I bore, assuming that such a calamity could ever befall me, would be thin and sallow, would weep without cease from aches in his vitals, would totter from room to room on his rickety pins clutching at his mother's apron-strings and hiding his face from strangers. But who would give me a baby, who would not turn to ice at the spectacle of my bony frame on the wedding-couch, the coat of fur up to my navel, the acrid cavities of my armpits, the line of black moustache, the eyes, watchful, defensive, of a woman who has never lost possession of herself? What huffing and puffing there would have to be before my house could be blown down! Who could wake my slumbering eggs? And who would attend my childbed? My father, scowling, with a whip? The brown folk, cowed servitors, kneeling to offer a trussed lamb, first fruits, wild honey, sniggering at the miracle of the virgin birth? Out of his hole he pokes his snout, son of the father, Antichrist of the desert come to lead his dancing hordes to the promised land. They whirl and beat drums, they shake axes and, pitchforks, they follow the babe, while in the kitchen his mother conjures over the fire, or tears out the guts of cocks, or cackles in her bloody armchair. A mind mad enough for parricide and pseudo-matricide and who knows what other atrocities can surely encompass, an epileptic Führer and the march of a band of overweening serfs on a country town from whose silver roofs the sunfire winks and from whose windows they are idly shot, to pieces. They lie in the dust, sons and daughters of the Hottentots, flies crawl in their wounds, they are carted off and buried in a heap. Labouring under my father's weight I struggle to give life to a world but seem to engender only death.

            25. By the light of a storm-lantern I see that they sleep the sleep of the blissfully sated, she on her back, her nightdress rucked about her hips, he face down, his left hand folded in hers. I bring not the meat-cleaver as I thought it would be but the hatchet, weapon of the Valkyries. I deepen myself in the stillness like a true lover of poetry, breathing with their breath.

            26. My father lies on his back, naked, the fingers of his right hand twined, in the fingers of her left, the jaw slack, the dark eyes closed on all their fire and lightning, a liquid rattle coming from the throat, the tired blind fish, cause of all my woe, lolling in his groin (would that it had been dragged out, long ago with all its roots and bulbs!). The axe sweeps up over my shoulder. All kinds of people have done this before me, wives, sons, lovers, heirs, rivals. I am not alone. Like a ball on a string it floats down at the end of my arm, sinks into the throat below me, and all is suddenly tumult. The woman snaps upright in bed, glaring about her, drenched in blood, bewildered by the angry wheezing and spouting at her side. How fortunate that at times like these, the larger action flows of itself and requires of the presiding figure no more than presence of mind! She wriggles her nightdress decently over her hips. Leaning forward and gripping what must be one of their four knees, I deliver much the better chop deep into the crown of her head. She dips over into the cradle of her lap and topples leftward in a ball, my dramatic tomahawk still embedded in her. (Who would have thought I had such strokes in me?) But fingers are scratching at me from this side of the bed, I am off balance, I must keep a, cool head, I must pick them off one by one, recover (with some effort) my axe, and hack with distaste at these hands, these arms until I have a free moment to draw a sheet over all this shuddering and pound it into quiet. Here I am beating with a steady rhythm, longer perhaps than is necessary, but calming myself too in preparation for what must be a whole new phase of my life. For no longer need I fret about how to fill my days. I have broken a commandment, and the guilty cannot be bored. I have two fullgrown bodies to get rid of besides many other traces of my violence. I have a face to compose, a story to invent, and all before dawn when Hendrik comes for the milking-pail!

            27. I ask myself: Why, since the moment she came clip-clop across the flats in the dog-cart drawn by a horse with ostrich-plumes in its harness, dusty after the long haul in her wide-brimmed hat, have I refused speech with her, stubbornly exerting myself to preserve the monologue of my life? Can I imagine what it would have been like to turn the pages of the mornings with her over steaming teacups, with the chickens clucking outside and the servants chattering softly in the kitchen, in whatever spirit, guarded or peaceful? Can I imagine cutting out patterns with her, or strolling through the orchard hand in hand, giggling? Is it possible that I am a prisoner not of the lonely farmhouse and the stone desert but of my stony monologue? Have my blows been aimed at shutting those knowing eyes or at silencing her voice? Might we not, bent over our teacups, have learned to coo to each other, or, drifting past each other in the dark corridor, hot and sleepless in the siesta hour, have touched, embraced, and clung? Might those mocking eyes not have softened, might I not have yielded, might we not have lain in each other's arms all afternoon whispering, two girls together? I stroke her forehead, she nuzzles my hand, I am held in the dark pools of her eyes, I do not mind.

            28. I ask myself: What is it in me that lures me into forbidden bedrooms and makes me commit forbidden acts? Has a lifetime in the desert, wrapped in this funnel of black cloth, wound me into such a coil of vicious energy that the merest pedlar or visiting third cousin would find himself poisoned at his meat or hatcheted in bed? Does an elementary life burn people down to elementary states, to pure anger, pure gluttony, pure sloth? Am I unfitted by my upbringing for a life of more complex feelings? Is that why I have never left the farm, foreign to townslife, preferring to immerse myself in a landscape of symbol where simple passions can spin and fume around their own centres, in limitless space, in endless time, working out their own forms of damnation?

            29. I ask myself: But am I doing Justice to the city? Is it not possible to conceive a city above whose rooftops drift the wisps of a thousand private fires, from whose streets, rises the susurrus of a thousand pattering damned voices? Perhaps; but it is too painterly, and I am not a painter.

            30. I ask myself: What am I going to do with the bodies?

            31. Far down in the earth flow the underground rivers, through dark caverns, dripping with crystalline water, graves, if only they could be reached, for all the family secrets in the world. I wade out into the tepid dam looking for the sinkhole which in our dreams beckons from the deep and leads to the underground kingdom. My skirt billows and floats around my waist like a black flower. My feet are soothed by the red slime, the green duckweed. Like abandoned twins my shoes watch from the bank. Of all adventures, suicide is the most literary, more so even than murder. With the story coming to its end, all one's last bad poetry finds release. I cast a long calm look of farewell at the sky and the stars, which probably cast a long calm vacant look back, exhale the last beloved breath (goodbye, spirit!), and dive for the abyss. Then the elegiac trance passes and all the rest is cold, wet, and farcical. My underwear balloons with water. I strike bottom all too soon, as far from the mythic vortex as ever. The first willed draught of water through my nostrils sets off a cough and the blind panic of an organism that wants to live. I haul myself to the surface with legs and arms. My head breaks, gasping and retching into the night air, I try to launch myself into the horizontal, but I am weary, weary. Perhaps I strike out once or twice with wooden arms. Perhaps I sink a second time, tasting the water with less revulsion now. Perhaps I come to the surface again, still thrashing, but also waiting for an interlude of stillness, to test and taste the languor of my muscles. Perhaps I beat the water now in one spot only, making a last bargain, giving up a breath for the sake of a single word, half water, half plea to the absent, to all the absent, who congregate now in the sky in a whirlwind of absence, removed, sightless, to call off the dogs, to call off the joke, before I sink again, and turn myself to the serious exploration of my last moments.

            32. But what do I know about exploring these deeps, I, a drudgemaiden who has spent her days over a cooking-pot in a sooty corner, and her nights pressing her knuckles into her eyes, watching the rings of light cascade and spin, waiting for visions? Like killing, dying is probably a story drearier than the one I tell myself. Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire? (I am unconvinced by talk about suspended dust particles.) Why crickets all night long and birdsong at dawn? But it is late. If there is a time for rumination there is also a time to go back to the kitchen, and at this moment I have a serious matter to attend to, the disposal of the corpses. For soon Hendrik is going to open the back door, and while it is true that the essence of servanthood is the servant's intimacy with his master's dirt, and while it is also true that there is a perspective in which corpses are dirt, Hendrik is not only essence but substance, not only servant but stranger. First Hendrik will come for the milking-pail, then, a little later, Anna, to wash the dishes, sweep the floor, make the beds. What will Anna think when she finds the household still but for the steady sound of scrubbing from the master's bedroom? She hesitates, listening, before she knocks. I cry out in fright, she hears me muffled through the heavy door: "No, not today! Anna, is that you? Not today--come back tomorrow. Now go away, please." She pads off. Standing with an ear to the crack I hear the back door close behind her, then, though she ought to be out of earshot, the trot of her feet on the gravel. Has she smelled blood? Has she gone to tell?

            33. The woman lies on her side with her knees drawn up to her chin. If I do not hurry she will set in that position. Her hair falls over her face in a sticky dark-red wing. Though her last act was to flinch from the terrific axe, screwing her eyes shut, clenching her teeth, the face has now relaxed. But the man, tenacious of life, has moved. His final experience must have been an unsatisfactory one, a groping with dulled muscles toward an illusory zone of safety. He lies head and arms over the edge of the bed, black with his heavy blood. It would have been better for him to have yielded the gentle ghost, following it as far as he could on its passage out, closing his eyes on the image of a swallow swooping, rising, riding.

            34. How fortunate at times like these that there is only one problem, a problem of cleanliness. Until this bloody afterbirth is gone there can be no new life for me. The bedclothes are soaked and will have to be burned. The mattress too will have to be burned, though not today. There is a quag of blood on the floor and there will be more blood when I shift the bodies. What of the bodies? They can be burned or buried or submerged. If buried or submerged they will have to leave the house. If buried they can be buried only where the earth is soft, in the riverbed. But if buried in the riverbed they will be washed out in the next spate, or in the one after that, and return to the world lolling in each other's rotten arms against the fence where the fence crosses the river. If weighted and sunk in the dam, they will contaminate the water and reappear as chained skeletons grinning to the sky in the next drought. But buried or drowned, they will have to be shifted, whether entire in barrowloads or in parcels. How clearly my mind works, like the mind of a machine. Am I strong enough to move them unaided in a wheelbarrow, or must I hack away until I have portable sections? Am I equal to carrying even a single monolithic trunk? Is there a way of partitioning a trunk without obscenity? I should have paid more attention to the art of butchery. And how does one chain flesh to rock without drilling holes? And with what? An auger? A brace and bit? What of exposure on an antheap as an alternative, or exposure on a remote part of the farm, in a cave? What of a funeral, pyre in the back yard? What of firing the house about all our ears? Am I equal to that?

            35. Of course the truth is that I am equal to anything, I am nothing if not embarrassed by my freedom, these tasks require only patience and meticulousness, of which, like the ant, I have overmuch, besides a steady stomach. If I go wandering in the hills I am sure that, in time, I will find boulders with holes through them, worn by the dripping of water in a bygone ice age, no doubt, or forged in a volcanic cataclysm. In the wagonhouse there are bound to be yards of providential chain, hitherto invisible, now suddenly leaping into sight, and casks of gunpowder, faggots of sandalwood. But what I now find myself wondering is whether it is not time for me to find a strong-thewed accomplice who, without pause for question, will swing the corpses on to his shoulders and stride off to dispose of them in some swift, effective way, such as stuffing them down an exhausted borehole and capping it with a mighty rock. For the day will come when I must have another human being, must hear another voice, even if it speaks only abuse. This monologue of the self is a maze of words out of which I shall not find a way until someone else gives me a lead. I roll my eyeballs, I pucker my lips, I stretch my ears, but the face in the mirror is my face and will go on being mine even if I hold it in the fire till it drips. No matter with what frenzy I live the business of death or wallow in blood and soapsuds, no matter what wolf howls I hurl into the night, my acts, played out within the macabre theatre of myself, remain mere behaviour. I offend no one, for there is no one to offend but the servants and the dead. How shall I be saved? And can this really be I (scrub-scrub-scrub), this bare-kneed lady? Have I, the true deepdown I beyond words, participated in these phenomena any more deeply than by simply being present at a moment in time, a point in space, at which a block of violence, followed by a block of scrubbing, for the sake of the servants, rattled past on their way from nowhere to nowhere? If I turn my back and walk away will this whole bloody lamplit scene not dwindle down the tunnel of memory, pass through the gates of horn, and leave me grinding my knuckles in my eyes in the grim little room at the end of the passage; waiting for my father's eyebrows to coalesce, then the black pools beneath them, then the cavern of the mouth, from which echoes and echoes his eternal NO?

            36. For he does not die so easily after all. Disgruntled, saddle-sore, it is he who rides in out of the sunset, who nods when I greet him, who stalks into the house and slumps in his armchair waiting for me to help him off with his boots. The old days are not gone after all. He has not brought home a new wife, I am still his daughter, if I can unsay the bad words perhaps even his good daughter, though it would be well, I can see, to keep out of his way while he ruminates a failure which I, innocent of the ways of courtship, kept all my life in the economic dark, will fail to understand. My heart leaps at this second chance, but I move demurely, I bow my head.

            37. My father pushes his food aside untouched. He sits in the front room staring into the grate. I light a lamp for him, but he waves me away. In my room, I pick at a hem and tune my ears to his silence. Does he sigh between the chimes of the clock? I undress and sleep. In the morning the front room is empty.

            38. Six months ago Hendrik brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in the donkey-cart, dusty after the long haul from Armoede. Hendrik wore the black suit passed on to him by my father with an old wide brimmed felt hat and a shirt buttoned to the throat. His bride sat by his side clutching her shawl, exposed and apprehensive. Hendrik had bought her from her father for six goats and a five-pound note, with a promise of five pounds more, or perhaps of five goats more, one does not always hear these things well. I have never seen Armoede, I seem never to have been anywhere, I seem to know nothing for sure, perhaps I am simply a ghost or a vapour floating at the intersection of a certain latitude and a certain longitude, suspended here by an unimaginable tribunal until a certain act is committed, a stake is driven through the heart of a corpse buried at a crossroads, perhaps, or somewhere a castle crumbles into a tarn, whatever that may be. I have never been to Armoede, but with no effort at all, this is one of my faculties, I can bring to life the bleak windswept hill, the iron shanties with hessian in the doorways, the chickens, doomed, scratching in the dust, the cold snot-nosed children tolling back from the dam with buckets of water, the same chickens scattering now before the donkey-cart in which Hendrik bears away his child-bride, bashful, kerchiefed, while the six dowry-goats nuzzle the thorns and watch through their yellow eyes a scene in its plenitude forever unknowable to me, the thorn-bushes, the midden, the chickens, the children scampering behind the cart, all held in a unity under the sun, innocent, but to me only names, names, names. There is no doubt about it, what keeps me going (see the tears roll down the slopes of my nose, only metaphysics keeps them from falling on the page, I weep for that lost innocence, mine and mankind's) is my determination, my iron determination, my iron intractable risible, determination to burst through the screen of names into the goatseye view of Armoede and the stone desert, to name only these, in despite of all the philosophers have said (and what do I, poor provincial blackstocking, know about philosophy, as the lamp gutters and the clock strikes ten?).

            39. Locked in sleep she lies all night at Hendrik's side, a child, still growing, now a fraction at the knee, now a fraction at the wrist, the proportions, always suave. In the old days, the bygone days, when Hendrik and his men followed their fat-tailed sheep from pasture to pasture, the golden age before the worm arrived on the wings of the howling storm no doubt, and decamped at the very spot where I sit, what a coincidence, perhaps then, when Hendrik was a patriarch bowing his knee to no one, he took to bed two wives who revered him, did his will, adapted their bodies to his desires, slept tight against him, the old wife on one side, the young wife on the other, that is how I imagine it. But tonight Hendrik has only one wife, and old Jakob in the schoolhouse has only one wife, who pouts and mutters. Borne on the wind at nightfall comes her crosspatch voice, the words blessedly indistinct, one cannot have too little of quarrelling, but the tunes of denunciation quite clear.

            40. This is not Hendrik's home. No one is ancestral to the stone desert, no one but the insects, among whom myself, a thin black beetle with dummy wings, who lays no eggs and blinks in the sun, a real puzzle to entomology. Hendrik's forebears in the olden days crisscrossed the desert with their flocks and their chattels, heading from A to B or from X to Y, sniffing for water, abandoning stragglers, making forced marches. Then one day fences began to go up--I speculate of course--men on horseback rode up and from shadowed faces issued invitations to stop and settle that might also have been orders and might have been threats, one does not know, and so one became a herdsman, and one's children after one, and one's women took in washing. Fascinating, this colonial history: I wonder whether a speculative history is possible, as a speculative philosophy, a speculative theology, and now, it would appear, a speculative entomology are possible, all sucked out of my thumb, to say nothing of the geography of the stone desert and animal husbandry. And economics: how am I to explain the economics of my existence, with its migraines and, siestas, its ennui, Its speculative languors, unless the sheep have something to eat (for this is not finally an insect farm); and what have I provided for them but stone and scrub? It must be the scrub that nourishes the sheep that nourish me, the bleached scrubgrass, the grey scrub-bushes, dreary to my eye but bursting with virtue and succulence to the sheep's. There is another great moment in colonial history: the first merino is lifted from shipboard, with block and tackle, in a canvas waistband, bleating with terror, unaware that this is the promised land where it will browse generation after generation on the nutritious scrub and provide the economic base for the presence of my father and myself in this lonely house where we kick our heels waiting for the wool to grow and gather about ourselves the remnants of the lost tribes of the Hottentots to be hewers of wood and drawers of water and shepherds and body-servants in perpetuity and where we are devoured by boredom and pull the wings off flies.

            41. Hendrik was not born here. He arrived from nowhere, the child of some father and some mother unknown to me, sent into the world in hard times, with or without a blessing, to earn his bread. He arrived one afternoon asking for work, though why here I cannot imagine, we are on the road from no A to no B in the world, if such a fate is topologically possible. I hope I use the word correctly, I have never had a tutor, I am not one of those long-legged hoydens that wandering tutors love to draw a stool up next to, but dour and sweaty and stupid with anxiety. Hendrik arrived one afternoon, a boy of sixteen, I am guessing, dusty of course, with a stick in his hand and a bag on his shoulder, stopping at the foot of the steps and looking up to where my father sat smoking and staring into the distance: that is our wont here, that must be the origin of our speculative bias, staring into the distance, staring into the fire. Hendrik doffed his hat, a characteristic gesture, a sixteen-year-old boy holding his hat to his breast, men and boys all wear hats here.

            "Baas," said Hendrik, "good day, baas. I am looking for work."

            My father hawked and swallowed. I render his words; I cannot know whether Hendrik heard what I heard besides, what I perhaps did not hear that day but hear now in my inner ear, the penumbra of moodishness or disdain about the words.

            "What kind of work are you looking for?"

            "Anything, just work, baas."

            "Where are you from?"

            "From Armoede, my baas. But now I come from baas Kobus. Baas Kobus says the baas has work here."

            "Do you work for baas Kobus?"

            "No, I do not work for baas Kobus. I was there looking for work. Then baas Kobus said that the baas has work. So I came."

            "What kind of work can you do? Can you work with sheep?"

            "Yes, I know sheep, baas."

            "How old are you? Can you count?"

            "I am strong. I will work. The baas will see."

            "Are you by yourself?"

            "Yes baas, I am by myself now."

            "Do you know the people on my farm?"

            "No baas, I know no one around here."

            "Now listen carefully. What is your name?"

            "Hendrik, my baas."

            "Listen carefully, Hendrik. Go to the kitchen and tell Anna to give you bread and coffee. Tell her she must fix a place for you to sleep. Tomorrow morning early I want you here. Then I will tell you your job. Now go."

            "Yes, my baas. Thank you, my baas."

            42. How satisfying, the flow of this dialogue. Would that all my life were like that, question and answer, word and echo, instead of the torment of And next? And next? Men's talk is so unruffled, so serene, so full of common purpose. I should have been a man, I would not have grown up so sour, I would have spent my days in the sun doing whatever it is that men do, digging holes, building fences, counting sheep. What is there for me in the kitchen? The patter of maids, gossip, ailments, babies, steam, foodsmells, cat-fur at the ankles--what kind of life can I make of these? Even decades of mutton and pumpkin and potatoes have failed to coax from me the jowls, the bust, the hips of a true country foodwife, have achieved no more than to send my meagre buttocks sagging down the backs of my legs. For alas, the power of my will, which I picture to myself as wire sheathed in crepe, has not after all been great enough to keep me forever pristine against those molecules of fat perishing by the million in their campaigns against the animalcules of my blood, they yet push their way forward, a tide of blind mouths that is how I imagine it, as I sit year after year across the table from my silent father, listening to the tiny teeth inside me. One should not expect miracles from a body. Even I will die. How chastening.

            43. The mirror. Inherited from my long-lost mother, whose portrait it must be that hangs on the wall of the dining-room over the heads of my silent father and my silent self, though why it is that when I conjure up that wall I find below the picture-rail only a grey blur, a strip of grey blur, if such is imaginable, traced out by my eye along the wall. Inherited from my long-lost mother, whom one day I shall find, the mirror fills the door of the wardrobe opposite my bed. It gives me no pleasure to pore over reflections of my body, but when I have sheathed myself in my nightgown, which is white--white for nighttime, black for daytime, that is how I dress--and my bedsocks for the winter cold and my nightcap for the drafts, I sometimes leave the light burning and recline abed sustained on my elbow and smile at the image that reclines abed facing me sustained on an elbow, and sometimes even talk to it, or her. It is at times like these that I notice (what a helpful device a mirror is for bringing things into the open, if one can call it a device, so simple is it, so devoid of mechanism) how thickly the hair grows between my eyes and wonder whether my glower, my rodent glower, to mince no words, I have no cause to love this face, might not be cosmetically tempered if I plucked out some of that hair with tweezers, or even all of it in a bunch, like carrots, with a pair of pliers, thereby pushing my eyes apart and creating an illusion of grace and even temper. And might I not soften my aspect too if I released my hair from its daytime net and pins, its nighttime cap, and washed it, and let it fall first to the nape of my neck, then perhaps one day to my shoulders, if it grows for corpses why should it not grow for me? And might I not be less ugly if I did something about my teeth, of which I have too many, by sacrificing some to give the others space to grow in, if I am not too old for growth? How equably I contemplate pulling out teeth: many things I fear but pain does not seem to be one of them. I would seat myself (I say to myself) in front of the mirror, clench the jaws of the pliers on a condemned tooth, and tug and worry till it came out. Then I would go on to the next one. And having done the teeth and the eyebrows I would go on to the complexion. I would run down to the orchard every morning and stand under the trees, the apricot-trees, the peach-trees, the fig-trees, devouring fruit until my bowels relented. I would take exercise, a morning walkdown the riverbed, an evening walk on the hillside. If the cause be physical that makes my skin so dull and pallid, my flesh so thin and heavy, if such combinations are possible, that I sometimes wonder whether the blood flows in me or merely stands in pools, or whether I have twenty-one skins instead of seven, as the books say if the cause be physical then the cure must be physical; if not, what is there left to believe in?

            44. But what a joy it would be to be merely plain, to be a plain placid empty-headed heiress anxious not to be left on the shelf, ready to commit herself body and soul to the first willing fellow to pass by, a pedlar even, or an itinerant teacher of Latin, and breed him six daughters, and bear his blows and curses with Christian fortitude, and live a decent obscure life instead of leaning on an elbow watching myself in the mirror in an atmosphere of gathering gloom and doom, if my bones tell me aright. Why, when I am able so relentlessly to leave my warm bed at five in the morning to light the stove, my feet blue with cold, my fingers cleaving to the frozen ironware, can I not leap up now, run through the moonlight to the toolchest, to the orchard, and begin the whole regimen of hair-plucking and tooth-pulling and fruit-eating before it is too late? Is there something in me that loves the gloomy, the hideous, the doom-ridden, that sniffs out its nest and snuggles down in a dark corner among rats droppings and chicken-bones rather than resign itself to decency? And if there is, where does it come from? From the monotony of my surroundings? From all these years in the heart of nature, seven leagues from the nearest neighbour, playing with sticks and stones and insects? I think not, though who am I to say. From my parents? From my father, angry, loveless? From my mother, that blurred oval behind, my father's head? Perhaps. Perhaps from them, jointly and severally, and behind them from my four grandparents, whom I have forgotten, but could certainly recall in case of need, and my eight great-grandparents and my sixteen great-great-grandparents, unless there is incest in the line, and the thirty-two before them and so forth until we come to Adam and Eve and finally to the hand of God, by a process whose mathematics has always eluded me. Original sin, degeneracy of the line: there are two fine, bold hypotheses for my ugly face and my dark desires, and for my disinclination to leap out of bed this instant and cure myself. But explanations do not interest me. I am, beyond the why and wherefore of myself. Fate is what I am interested in; or, failing fate, whatever it is that is going to happen to me. The woman in the nightcap watching me from the mirror, the woman who in a certain sense is me, will dwindle and expire here in the heart of the country unless she has at least a thin porridge of event to live on. I am not interested in becoming one of those people who look into mirrors and see nothing, or walk in the sun and cast no shadow. It is up to me.

            45. Hendrik. Hendrik is paid in kind and cash. What was once two shillings at the end of the month has now grown to six shillings. Also two slaughter-sheep and weekly rations of flour, mealie-meal, sugar, and coffee. He has his own vegetable patch. He is clothed in my father's good castoffs. He makes shoes for himself from skins that he cures and tans. His Sundays are his own. In sickness he is cared for. When he grows too old to work his duties will be passed on to a younger man and he will retire to a bench in the sun from where he will watch his grandchildren at their play. His grave is marked out for him in the graveyard. His daughters will close his eyes. There are other ways of arranging things, but none that I know of so pacific as this.

            46. Hendrik wishes to start a line, a humble line of his own in parallel to the line of my grandfather and my father, to speak only of them. Hendrik would like a house full of sons and daughters. That is why he has married. The second son, he thinks, the obedient one, will stay behind, learn the farmwork, be a pillar of help, marry a good girl, and continue the line. The daughters, he thinks, will work in the farmhouse kitchen. On Saturday nights they will be courted by boys from the neighbouring farms, come epic distances across the veld on their bicycles with guitars strapped on their shoulders, and bear children out of wedlock. The first son, the quarrelsome one, the one who will not say Yes, will leave home to find work on the railways, and be stabbed in a brawl, and die alone and break his mother's, heart. As for the other sons, the obscure ones, perhaps they too will leave in search of work and never be heard of again, or perhaps they will die in infancy, along with a percentage of the daughters, so that although the line will ramify it will not ramify too far. Those are Hendrik's ambitions.

            47. Hendrik has found a wife because he is no longer a young man, because he does not wish his blood to die from the earth forever, because he has come to dread nightfall, because man was not made to live alone.

            48. I know nothing of Hendrik. The reason for this is that in all our years together on the farm he has kept his station while I have kept my distance; and the combination of the two, the station and the distance, has ensured that my gaze falling on him, his gaze falling on me, have remained kindly, incurious, remote. This passes with me for an explanation. Hendrik is a man who works on the farm. He is nothing but a tall, straight-shouldered brown man with high cheekbones and slanting eyes who crosses the yard with a swift tireless walk I cannot imitate, the legs swivelled from the hip rather than bent at the knee, a man who slaughters the sheep for us on Friday evenings and hangs the carcase in the tree and chops the wood and milks the cow and says, "Morning, miss," in the mornings and lifts his hat and goes about his duties. We have our places, Hendrik and I, in an old old code. With fluid ease we move through the paces of our dance.

            49. I keep the traditional distance. I am a good mistress, fair-minded, even-handed, kindly, in no sense a witch-woman. To the servants my looks do not count, and I am grateful. Therefore what I feel blowing in on the thin dawn-wind is not felt by me alone. All of us feel it, and all of us have grown sombre. I lie awake listening to the cries, muted, stifled, of desire and sorrow and disgust and anguish, even anguish, that swoop and glide and tremble through this house so that one might think it infested with bats, with anguished, disgusted, sorrowful, longing bats, searching for a lost nesting-place, wailing at a pitch that makes dogs cringe and sears that inner ear of mine which, even in subterranean sleep, tunes itself to my father's signals. It is from his bedroom that the cries have been coming, higher and angrier and sorrier than ever since Hendrik brought back his girl from Armoede, the dust rising lazily behind the cart, the donkeys toiling up the path to the cottage, weary after the long haul. At the door Hendrik pulls up, he rests the whip in its socket and dismounts and lifts the girl down, and turning his back on, her begins to unharness. And standing here on the stoep six hundred yards away my father for the first time sees through his heavy field-glasses the red kerchief, the wideset eyes, the pointed chin, the sharp little teeth, the foxy jaw, the thin arms, the slender body of Hendrik's Anna.

            50. The great beam of my vision swings and for a spell. Hendrik's child-bride is illuminated, stepping down from the donkey-cart. Then, like the lighthouse-keeper strapped into his chair against the treacherous seventh wave, I watch the girl dip back into the dark, hear the grinding of the cogs that turn the lamp and wait for Hendrik, or my father, or that other woman, to swim into view and glow for a spell with a light that is not their own but comes from me and may even be not light but fire. I have only, I tell myself, to throw off the straps and haul on the lever ready to my hand for the cogs to stop grinding and the light to fall steady on the girl, her slim arms, her slender body; but I am a coward, to speak only of cowardice, the beam swings on, and in a moment I am watching the stone desert or the goats or my face in the mirror, objects on which I can happily release the dry acid breath I have held back so painfully, breath that is, I cannot after all deny it, my spirit, my self, or as much so as the light is. Though I may ache to abdicate the throne of consciousness and enter the mode of being practised by goats or stones, it is with an ache I do not find intolerable. Seated here I hold the goats and, stones, the entire farm and even its environs, as far as I know them, suspended in this cool, alienating medium of mine, exchanging them, item by item for my word counters. A hot gust lifts and drops a flap of ochre dust. The landscape recomposes itself and settles. Then Hendrik hands his bride down from the donkey cart. Vivid and unwitting under the lenses of the field-glasses she takes her first steps toward the cottage, still holding what may be a withered posy, her toes demurely inward, soft flesh brushing soft flesh under the stiff calico of her skirt, and words again begin to falter. Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. Hendrik's bride, her sly doe-eyes, her narrow hips, are beyond the grope of words until desire consents to mutate into the curiosity of the watcher. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue. I struggle with the proverbs of hell.

            51. In the hour before dawn Hendrik wakes, roused by sounds too subtle for my ear, veerings of the wind, the rustlings of birds at the tail-end of deep. In the dark he puts on his trousers, his shoes, his jacket. He rekindles the fire and brews coffee. Behind his back the stranger pulls up the kaross snug about her ears and lies watching. Her eyes gleam, orange. The window is shut, the air in the cottage rich with human smells. They have lain naked all night, waking and sleeping, giving off their complex odours: the smoky sourness of brown people, I know that by heart. I must have had a brown nurse though I cannot recall her; (I sniff again, the other smells are harder) the iron smell of blood certainly, coming piercingly through the blood the thin acrid track of the girl's excitement; and finally, drenching the air with milky sweetness, the flood of Hendrik's response. The question to ask is not, How do I, a lonely spinster, come to know such things? It is not for nothing that I spend evenings humped over the dictionary. Words are words. I have never pretended to embrace that night's experience. A factor, I deal in signs merely. The true question is, If I know these things, then how much the more must my father not know them, and therefore, swelling with envy in its cell, why does the hot shell of his heart not burst? I pick up and sniff and describe and drop, moving from one item to the next, numbering the universe steadily with my words; but what weapons has he with which to keep at bay the dragons of desire? I am no prophetess, but a chill in the wind tells me that disaster is coming. I hear dark footfalls in the empty passages of our house. I hunch my shoulders and wait. After decades of sleep something is going to befall us.

            52. Hendrik squats before the fire to pour the boiling water over the coffee-grounds. While the idyll lasts he will make his own coffee. Then the girl, from fairy visitor grown to wife, will learn to get up first, and no doubt soon be shouted at and beaten too. Ignorant of this she watches eagerly, rubbing the warm soles of her feet together.

            53. Hendrik steps oat into the last of the night-world. In the trees along the riverbed birds begin to grow restless. The stars are clear as ice. The pebbles grate crisply under his shoes. I hear the clank of the pail against the stone floor of the storeroom, then his swift stride crunching away to the cowshed. My father tosses his blankets aside, swings out of bed, and stands on the cold floor in his socks. In my own room I am already dressing, for I must have his coffee ready when, stern and drawn, he stamps into the kitchen. Life on the farm.

            54. No word about the marriage has passed between Hendrik and my father since the day when Hendrik came to ask leave to bring a wife on to the farm and my father replied, "Do as you wish." The wedding-feast was held at Armoede, the wedding-night on the road or here, I do not know, and the day after that Hendrik was back at work. My father increased his rations but offered no wedding-gift. The first time I saw Hendrik after the announcement I said, "Congratulations Hendrik," and he touched his hat and smiled and said, "Thank you, miss."

            55. Sitting on the stoep side by side, watching the last of the sunset, waiting for shooting-stars, we sometimes hear the twang of Hendrik's guitar-strings, fumbling, gentle, across the river. One night when the air was particularly still we heard him pick his way through the whole of Daar bo op die berg. But most nights the wind whips the frail sounds away, and we might as well be on separate planets, we on ours, they on theirs.

            56. I see little of Hendrik's bride. While he is away she keeps to the cottage, foraying only to the dam for water or to the river for firewood, where my eye is unfailingly drawn to her scarlet kerchief bobbing among the trees. She is familiarizing herself with her new life, with the routine of cooking and washing, with her duties to her husband, with her own body, with the four walls around her, with the view from the front door and the great whitewashed farmhouse that lies at the centre of that view, with the heavy man and the brisk, thin woman who come out on the stoep in the evenings and sit staring into space.

            57. Hendrik and his wife visit Jakob and Anna on Sundays. They put on their best clothes, span in the donkeys, and trundle sedately down the half-mile of track to the old schoolhouse. I ask Anna about the girl. She says she is "sweet" but still, a child. If she is a child, what am I? I see that Anna would like to take her under her wing.

            58. Hat in hand, Hendrik stands at the kitchen door waiting for me to look up. Across the batter-bowl and the broken eggshells I meet his eyes.

            "Good morning, miss."

            "Good morning, Hendrik. How are you?"

            "We are well, miss. I came to ask: does miss perhaps have work in the house? For my wife, miss."

            "Yes, perhaps I have, Hendrik. But where is your wife?"

            "She is here, miss." He nods back over his shoulder, then finds my eyes again.

            "Tell her to come inside."

            He turns; and says "Hë!" smiling tightly. There is a flash of scarlet and the girl slips behind, him. He steps aside; leaving her framed in the doorway, hands clasped, eyes downcast.

            "So you are another Anna. Now we have two Annas."

            She nods, still averting her face.

            "Talk to the miss!" whispers Hendrik. His voice is harsh, but that means nothing, we all know, such are the games we play for each other.

            "Anna, miss, " whispers Anna. She clears her throat softly.

            "Then you will have to be Klein-Anna--we can't have two Annas in the same kitchen, can we? "

            She is beautiful. The head and eyes are childishly large, the lines of lip and cheekbone clear as if outlined in pencil. This year, and next year, and, perhaps the next, you will still be beautiful, I say to myself, until the second child comes, and the childbearing and the ailments and the squalor and monotony exhaust you; and Hendrik feels betrayed and bitter, and you and he begin to shout at each other, and your skin creases and your eyes dull. You will be like me yet, I tell myself, never fear.

            "Look at me, Anna, don't be shy. Would you like to come and work in the house?"

            She nods slowly, rubbing her instep with her big toe. I watch her toes and her wiry calves.

            "Come on, child, speak, I won't eat you up!"

            "Hë!" whispers Hendrik from the door.

            "Yes, miss," she says.

            I advance on her, drying my hands on my apron. She does not flinch, but her eyes flicker toward Hendrik. I touch her under the chin with my forefinger and lift her face.

            "Come, Anna, there is nothing to be afraid of. Do you know who I am?"

            She looks straight into my eyes. Her mouth is trembling. Her eyes are not black but dark dark brown, darker even than Hendrik's.

            " Well, who am I?"

            "Miss is the miss."

            "Well, come on then!... Anna!"

            But Anna, my old Anna, has, it seems, been hovering in the passage all the time, listening. "Anna, this is our Klein-Anna. You are so nice and big: what if we make you Ou-Anna, then she can be Klein-Anna. How does that sound?"

            "That sounds fine, miss. "

            "Now listen: give her a mug of tea, then she can get down to work. Show her where the things for scrubbing are kept. I want her to scrub the kitchen floor first of all. And you, Klein-Anna, you must see to it that you bring your own mug and plate tomorrow. Will you remember?"

            "Yes, miss."

            "Hendrik, you must go now, the baas will be cross if he sees you hanging around here."

            "Yes, miss. Thank you, miss."

            All of this in our own language, a language of nuances, of supple word-order and delicate particles, opaque to the outsider, dense to its children with moments of solidarity, moments of distance.

            59. It rained this morning. For days there had been rainclouds rolling in trains across the sky from horizon to horizon, and far-off thunder rattling against the dome of space, and a sultry gloom. Then, at mid-morning the birds began to circle and settle and give muted nesting calls. All breath of air ceased. Drops of water, huge, lukewarm, splashed straight down out of the sky, faltered, then began to fall in earnest as the thunderstorm, laced with lightning and endlessly resonating, cut a path across us moving northward. For an hour it rained. Then it was over, birds sang, the earth steamed, the last fresh runnels dwindled and sank away.

            60. Today I darned six pairs of socks for my father. There is a convention older than myself which says that Anna should not do the darning.

            61. Today's leg of mutton was excellent: tender, juicy, roasted to a turn. There is a place for all things. Life is possible in the desert.

            62. Coming over the rise past the dam, my father gathers about his head and shoulders the streaks and whorls, orange, pink, lavender, mauve, crimson, of the haloed sunset display. Whatever it is that he has been doing today (he never says, I never ask), he comes home nevertheless, in pride and glory, a fine figure of a man.

            63. In the face of all the allures of sloth, my father has never ceased to be a gentleman. When he goes out riding he wears his riding-boots, which I must help him off with and which Anna must wax. On his inspection tour every second week be wears a coat and tie. In a stud-box he keeps three collar-studs. Before meals he washes his hands with soap. He drinks his brandy ceremonially, by himself, from a brandy-glass, of which he has four, by lamplight, sitting in an armchair. Every month, stiff as a ramrod, on a stool outside the kitchen door, the chickens eyeing him and clucking, he subjects himself to the discipline of my cutting-scissors. I trim the iron-grey hair, smoothing it with the palm of my hand. Then he stands up, shakes out the napkins, thanks me, and stalks away. Who would think that out of rituals like these he could string together day after day, week after week, month after month, and, it would seem, year after year, riding in every evening against a flaming sky as though he had spent the whole day waiting for this moment, his horse tethered in a thorn-tree's shade just over the rise, he reclining against the saddle, whittling clothespegs, smoking, whistling through his teeth, dozing with his hat over his eyes, his pocket-watch in his band. Is that the extent of the hidden life he leads when he is out of sight or is the thought irreverent?

            54. Every sixth day, when, our cycles coincide, his cycle of two days, my cycle of three, we are driven to the intimacy of relieving our bowels in the bucket-latrine behind the fig-trees in the malodour of the other's fresh faeces, either he in my stench, or I in his. Sliding aside the wooden lid I straddle his hellish gust, bloody, feral, the kind that flies love best, flecked, I am sure, with undigested flesh barely mulled over before pushed through. Whereas my own (and here I think of him with his trousers about his knees, screwing his nose as high as he can while the blowflies buzz furiously in the black space below him) is dark olive with, bile, hard-packed, kept in too long, old, tired: We heave and strain, wipe ourselves in our different ways with squares of store-bought toilet paper, mark of gentility, recompose our clothing, and return to the great outdoors. Then it becomes Hendrik's charge to inspect the bucket and, if it prove not to be empty, to empty it in a hole dug far away from the house, and wash it out, and return it to its place. Where exactly the bucket is emptied I do not know; but somewhere on the farm there is a pit where, looped in each other's coils, the father's red snake and the daughter's black embrace and sleep and dissolve.

            65. But the patterns change. My father has begun to come home in the mornings. Never before has he done this. He blunders into the kitchen, and makes tea for himself. Me he shrugs away. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his back to the two Annas, if they are there, looking out of the window while the tealeaves draw. The maids hunch their shoulders, disquieted, obliterating themselves. Or if they are not there he wanders through the house cup in hand until he finds Klein-Anna, sweeping or polishing or whatever, and stands over her, watching, saying nothing. I hold my tongue. When he leaves we women all relax.

            66. In this bare land it is hard to keep secrets. We live naked beneath each other's hawkeyes, but live so under protest. Our resentment of each other, though buried in our breasts, sometimes rises to choke us, and we take long walks, digging our fingernails into our palms. It is only by whelming our secrets in ourselves that we can keep them. If we are tight-lipped it is because there is much in us that wants to burst out. We search for objects, for our anger and, when we find them, rage immoderately. The servants dread my father's rages, always in excess of their occasion. Goaded by him, they lash the donkeys, throw stones at the sheep. How fortunate that beasts feel no anger, but endure and endure! The psychology of masters.

            67. While Hendrik is out on a godforsaken task in the heat of the afternoon my father visits his wife. He rides up to the door of the cottage and waits, not dismounting, till the girl comes out, and stands before him squinting against the sun. He speaks to her. She is bashful. She hides her face. He tries to soothe her. Perhaps he even smiles, but I cannot see. He leans down and gives her a brown paper packet. It is full of candies, hearts and diamonds with mottoes on them. She stands holding the packet while he rides away.

            68. Or: As Klein-Anna makes her way homeward in the heat of the afternoon my father comes upon her. She stops, while bending over the horse's neck, he speaks to her. She is bashful and hides her face. He tries to soothe her, even smiling at her. From his pocket he takes a brown paper packet, which he gives her. It Is full of candies, what they call hearts and diamonds. She folds the packet small, and walks on.

            69. He bends over the horse's neck, talking to the girl, trying to soothe her. She hides her face. He reaches into his pocket and I catch a flash of silver. For an instant the coin lies open in her palm, a shilling or even a florin. They both look at it. Then the hand closes. He rides off and she walks home.

            70. He pecks at his food and pushes it away. He drinks his glass of brandy not sitting in his armchair but pacing about the yard in the moonlight. His voice, when he speaks to me, is gruff with defiance and shame. I do not need to lurk behind the shutters to know his guilty thoughts.

            71. Where can she possibly spend the money? Where will she hide it from her husband? Where will she hide the sweets? Or will she eat them all herself in a single day? Is she so much of a child? If she has one secret from her husband she will soon have two. Cunning, cunning gift!

            72. He believes that he will begin to prosper once I am out of the way. Though he dare not say so, he would like me to take to my bedchamber with a migraine and stay there. I am prepared to believe he is sincere when he says to himself that he wishes I and Hendrik and all the other hindrances would go away. But how long does he think their idyll will last, the two of them alone on the farm, an ageing man and a servant-girl, a silly child? He will be maddened by the vacuous freedom of it. What will they do together day after day after day? What can they have to say to each other? The truth is that he needs our opposition, our several oppositions, to hold the girl away from him, to confirm his desire for her, as much as he needs our opposition to be powerless against that desire. It is not privacy that he truly wants, but the helpless complicity of watchers. Nor can I believe that he does not know how he enters my dreams, in what capacities, committing what acts. The long passage that links the two wings of the house, with his bedroom in one wing and mine in the other, teems with nocturnal spectres, he and I among them. They are not my creatures nor are they his: they are ours together. Through them we possess and are possessed by each other. There is a level, we both know, at which Klein-Anna is a pawn and the real game lies between the two of us.

            73. I have given in to his wish and announced my indisposition. The green shutters are locked. All day I lie stretched out on the counterpane with my horny toes in the air and a pillow over my eyes. Everything I need is here: under the bed a pot, by the bedside a carafe of water with a tumbler over the neck. Old Anna brings the meals and cleans the room. I eat like a bird. I take nothing for the migraine, knowing that nothing will help me and being anyhow a cultist of pain. Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it. The air is cool and green even in the afternoons. Sometimes the pain is a solid block behind the wall of my forehead, sometimes a disk within my skull tilting and humming with the movements of the earth, sometimes a wave that unrolls and thuds endlessly against the backs of my eyelids. I lie hour after hour concentrating on the sounds inside my head. In a trance of absorption I hear the pulse in my temples, the explosion and eclipse of cells, the grate of bone, the sifting of skin, into dust. I listen to the molecular world inside me with the same attention I bring to the prehistoric world outside. I walk in the riverbed and hear the cascade of thousands of grains of sand, or smell the iron exhalation of rocks in the sun. I bring my understanding to the concerns of insects--the particles of food that must be carried over mountaintops and stored in holes, the eggs that must be arranged in hexagons, the rival tribes that must be annihilated. The habits of birds, too, are stable. It is therefore with reluctance that I confront the gropings of human desire. Clenched beneath a pillow in a dim room, focused on the kernel of pain, I am lost in the being of my being. This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of inferiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain. It seems to be the only career, if we except death, for which life in the desert has fitted me.

            74. My father is exchanging forbidden, words with Klein-Anna. I do not need to leave my room, to know. We, he is saying to her, we two; and the word reverberates in the air between them. Now: come with me now, he is saying to her. There are few enough words true, rock-hard enough to build a life on, and these he is destroying. He believes that he and she can choose their words and make a private language, with an I and you and here and now of their own. But there can be no private language. Their intimate you is my you too. Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes. How can I speak to Hendrik as before when they corrupt my speech? How do I speak to them?

            75. Days and nights wheel past, the light in my shuttered room brightens, to grey-green and darkens to black, old Anna appeals and disappears and reappears in a round of pot and plate, murmuring, clacking. I lie here, involved in cycles of time, outside the true time of the world, while my father and Hendrik's wife travel their arrow-straight paths from lust to capture, from helplessness to the relief of surrender; Now they are past cajolements and gifts and shy shakings of the head. Hendrik is ordered to the remotest marches of the farm to burn the ticks off sheep. My father tethers his horse outside his servant's house. He locks the door behind:him. The girl tries to push his hands off, but she is awed by what is about to happen. He undresses her and lays her out on his servant's coir mattress. She is limp in his arms. He lies with her and rocks with her in an act which I know enough about to know that it too breaks codes.

            76. "I look upon any poor man as totally undone," whispers a voice (in my solitude I hear voices, perhaps I am truly a witch-woman), "totally undone if he has the misfortune to have an honest heart, a fine wife, and a powerful neighbour." Poor Hendrik: undone, undone. I weep drunken weeping. Then I screw my eyes tight against the pain and wait for the three figures to dissolve into streaks and pulses and whorls: Hendrik playing his mouthorgan beneath a far-off thorn-tree, the couple clenched in the stifling hut. There is finally only I, drifting into sleep, beyond the reach of pain. Acting on myself I change the world. Where does this power end? Perhaps that is what I am trying to find out.

            77. Anna has not come. All morning I have lain waiting for her discreet tap at the door. I think of tea and rusks and my saliva flows. There is no doubt about it, I am not pure spirit.

            78. I stand in my slippers in the empty kitchen, dizzy after my long hibernation. The stove is cold. The sun blinks on the rows of copperware.

            79. I stand behind my chair, gripping the back, and speak to my father.

            "Where is Anna? She has not been in today."

            He forks up a mouthful of rice and gravy, bending over his plate. He chews with appetite.

            "Anna? How should I know where Anna is? It's none of my business. The maids are your business. Which Anna are you talking about?"

            "I'm talking about our Anna. Our Anna, not the other one. I want to know where she is. The schoolhouse is empty."

            "They have gone. They left this morning."

            "Who has gone?"

            "She and old Jakob. They took the donkey-cart."

            "And why have they suddenly left? Why didn't you tell me? Where have they gone?"

            "They have gone. They asked me, and I said they could. What else do you want to know?"

            "Nothing. There is nothing more I want to know."

            80. Or perhaps as I come into the room words are already issuing from that towering black cylinder.

            "Anna and Jakob have gone. I have given them a holiday. You will have to get along without Anna for a while."

            81. Or perhaps there is only the empty kitchen, and the cold stove, and the rows of gleaming copperware, and absence, two absences, three absences, four absences. My father creates absence. Wherever he goes he leaves absence behind him. The absence of himself, above all, a presence so cold, so dark, so remote as to be itself an absence, a moving shadow casting a blight on the heart. And the absence of my mother. My father is the absence of my mother, her negative, her death. She the soft, the fair; he the hard, the dark. He has murdered all the motherly in me and left me this brittle, hairy shell with the peas of dead words rattling in it. I stand in the empty kitchen hating him.

            82. The past. I grope around inside my head for the mouth of the tunnel that will lead me back in time and memory past images of myself younger and younger, fresher and fresher, through youth and childhood back to my, mother's knee and my origins, but the tunnel is not there. Inside my skull the walls are glassy, I see only reflections of myself drab and surly staring back at myself. How can I believe this creature was ever a child, how can I believe she was born of humankind? Easier to imagine her crawling from under a stone in her bottlegreen sheath, licking the egg slime off herself before taking her bearings and crawling off to this farmhouse to take up residence behind the wainscot.

            83. But perhaps if I spend a day in the loft emptying old trunks I will find evidence of a credible past: ornamental fans, lockets and cameos, dancing slippers, favours and souvenirs, a baptismal frock, and photographs, if there were photographs in those days, daguerreotypes perhaps, showing a scowling baby with its hair in curls sitting in the lap of a woman, hesitant, obscure, and behind them the stiff figure of a man, and, who knows, beside them a scowling lad too, in a suit trimmed with lace, a brother who must have died in one of the great epidemics, the influenza epidemic or the smallpox epidemic, leaving me without a protector. And then, in the bloom of her tentative young motherhood; the woman must have died trying to give birth to a third child, died as she feared she would, afraid to deny the man his detested relentless pleasure in her, her death a hideous storm, of terror, with the midwife wringing her hands about the room and recommending ipecacuanha as a last resort.

            84. All over this land there must be patient middle-aged children waiting for their parents' grip on the keys to slacken. The day I compose my father's hands on his breast and pull the sheet over his face, the day I take over the keys, I will unlock the rolltop desk, and, uncover all the secrets he has kept from me, the ledgers and banknotes and deeds and wills, the photographs of the dead woman inscribed "With all my love", the packet of letters tied in a red ribbon. And in the darkest corner of the bottommost pigeonhole I will uncover the onetime ecstasies of the corpse, the verses folded three and four times and packed into a manila envelope, the sonnets to Hope and Joy, the confessions of love, the passionate vows and dedications, the postmarital rhapsodies, the quatrains, "To my Son"; and then no more, silence, the vein petering out. At some point on the line from youth to man, to husband to father to master the heart must have turned to stone. Was it there, with the advent of the stunted girl? Was I the one who killed the life in him, as he kills the life in me?

            85. In grotesque pink slippers I stand in the centre of the kitchen floor. My eyes pinch against the stab of the sunlight. Behind me lies the haven of the bed in the darkened room, before me the irritation of a day's housework. How can I possibly, out of the somnolence and banality of my life, out of ignorance and incapacity, whip up the menace of an outraged daughter. Confronting an abashed or arrogant father, a brazen, or trembling servant-girl? My heart is not in it, nothing has prepared me for this part. Life in the desert teaches nothing if not that all things are permissible. I want no more than to creep back into bed and fall asleep with my thumb in my mouth, or else to search out my oldest sunbonnet and wander away down the riverbed, till the house is out of sight and I hear nothing but the cicadas thrilling and the flies whipping past my face. My theme is the endless drift of the currents of sleep and waking, not the storms of human conflict. Where this house stands in, the desert there is a turbulence, a vortex, a black hole that I live in, but abhor. I would have been far happier under a bush, born in a parcel of eggs, bursting my shell in unison with a thousand sisters; and invading the world in an army of chopping mandibles. Between four walls my rage is baffled. Reflected from planes of plaster and tile and board and wallpaper, my outpourings rain back on me, stick to me, seep back through my skin. Though I may look like a machine with opposed thumbs that does housework, I am in truth a sphere quivering with violent energies, ready to burst upon whatever fractures me. And while there is one impulse in me that tells me to roll out and erupt harmlessly in the great outdoors, I fear that there is another impulse--I am full of contradictions--telling me to hide in a corner like a black widow spider and engulf whoever passes in my venom. "Take that for the youth I never had!" I hiss and spit, if spiders can spit.

            86. But the truth is that I have worn black widow weeds longer than I can remember; for all I know I was a baby in a black diaper waving my rickety little legs, clutching at my black knitted bootees, wailing. Certainly at the age of six I was wearing, day in, day out, a hideous bottlegreen frock that draped me from throat to wrists and revealed the merest flash of meagre shins before these were engulfed in black clubshoes. I must have been photographed at that age, I have no other explanation for it; there must be a photograph of me in one of those trunks or desks, and I must have missed it when I was listing the items. How could a mere child have had enough self-awareness to see herself with such dispassionate clarity, down to the pinched mouth and the pallor and the ratstail of hair? Or perhaps I had a vision, I must not rely too much on photographs, what could all those photographers have been doing in the desert, when I was a child, not hunting me I am sure; perhaps, being a brooding kind of child, I was transported out of myself for an instant and had a vision of myself, as I really was, in my bottlegreen dress, which must surely also be in the loft, stuck away somewhere, before I was returned to my unthinking animal integrity by whoever it was that vouchsafed me the vision, my tutelary angel, or some other variety of angel, a variety that warns one against high hopes for oneself perhaps, an angel of reality, a minatory angel. Or perhaps I never had animal integrity, or lost it before I was six, perhaps by the age of six I was already a little corporal machine trotting around the yard building enclosures of stones or whatever it is that children do, pulling the wings off flies, watched over gravely by a little ghostly double; perhaps, regrettably, there are no angels; perhaps all the snapshots of my childish self that I carry about with me are the work of that little watcher (what else had she to do?), perhaps she split off from me when I was very very young, perhaps even my vision of myself as a baby with heartburn or heartache or whatever, clutching at my black bootees and wailing, is a vision of that double, pondering by the cribside, feeling her own ghostly heartache. I guess of course that it was a she, besides seeing blind alleys bifurcating everywhere, which I ignore, being after bigger things than problems of philosophy.

            87. I am a black widow in mourning for the uses I was never put to. All my life I have been left lying about, forgotten, dusty, like an old shoe, or when I have been used, used as a tool, to bring the house to order, to regiment the servants. But I have quite another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space. I move through the world not as a knifeblade cutting the wind, or as a tower with eyes, like my father, but as a hole, a hole with a body draped around it, the two spindly legs hanging loose at the bottom and the two bony arms flapping at the sides and the big head lolling on top. I am a hole crying to be whole. I know this is in one sense just a way of speaking, a way of thinking about myself, but if one cannot think of oneself in words, in pictures, then what is there to think of oneself in? I think of myself as a straw woman, a scarecrow, not too tightly stuffed, with a scowl painted on my face to scare the crows and in my centre a hollow, a space which the fieldmice could use if they were very clever; But this is more than a picture; I cannot deny it, I am not ignorant of anatomy, I am not incurious about my constitution, I am among other things a farmgirl living in the midst of the hurlyburly of nature, or such paltry hurlyburly as we have in the desert, not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled, leading to another hole never filled either. If I am an O, I am sometimes persuaded, it must be because I am a woman. Yet how galling, after meditations that would do credit to a thinker, to find myself worked into the trap of conceding that if only I had a good man to sleep at my side, and give me babies, all would be well, I would perk up and learn to smile, my limbs would fill out, my skin glow, and the voice inside my head stutter and stumble into silence. I do not have it in me to believe that the mating of farmboy with farmgirl will save me, whatever save may mean, at least for the time being, there is no knowing what shifts I may be driven to. Provisionally, I believe myself reserved for a higher fate. Therefore if by a miracle one of the rawboned neighbours should come trotting along one day with a posy of veld-flowers, blushing and sweating, to court me for my inheritance, I will take to my bed or read to him from my terrible sonnets or writhe at his feet in a fit, anything to send him galloping off; always assuming that we have neighbours, I see no evidence of it, we might as well be living on the moon.

            88. On the other hand, I have been able, sometimes for days on end, to lose my sense of election, to see myself as simply a lonely, ugly old maid, capable of redemption, to some extent, from loneliness, from loneness, by marriage, a human institution to another lone soul, a soul perhaps greedier than most, stupider, uglier, not much of a catch, but then what kind of catch am I; whom I would vow to bend to a little lower, slave for a little harder than another woman would, whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights in the dark, so as not to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the bedside, and endure the huffing and puffing of, and be filled eventually, one expects, with seed by, and lie listening to the snoring of, till the balm of slumber arrive. What I lack in experience I plainly make up for in vision; if the commerce of men with women is not like that it might as well be. I can imagine too falling pregnant after many moons, though it would not astonish me if I were barren, I look like the popular notion of the barren woman, and then, after seven or eight months, giving birth to a child, with no midwife and my husband blind drunk in the next room, gnawing through the umbilical cord; clapping the livid, babyface to my flat sour breast; and then, after a decade of closeted breeding, emerging into the light of day at the head of a litter of ratlike, runty girls, all the spit image of myself, scowling into the sun, tripping over their own feet, identically dressed, in bottlegreen smocks and snubnosed black shoes; and then, after another decade of listening to their hissing and clawing, packing them off one by one to the outside world to do whatever it is that unprepossessing girls do there, live in boarding-houses and work in post-offices perhaps, and bear illegitimate ratchildren to send back to the farm for sanctuary.

            89. Perhaps that is all that election means to me: not to have to figure in, a bucolic comedy like the above, not to be explained away by poverty, degeneracy, torpor, or sloth. I want my story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not the yawning middle without end which threatens no less if I connive at my father's philandering and live to guard his dotage than if I am led to the altar by a swain and die full of years, a wizened granny in a rocking-chair. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep roe going. For the other kind of story, the weave of reminiscence in the dozing space of the mind, can never be mine. My life is not past, my art cannot be the art of memory. What will happen to me has not yet happened. I am a blind spot hurtling with both eyes open into the maw of the future, my password "And then?" And if at this instant I do not look as if I am hurtling, it is only because I dither for a while in the empty house, feeling the comfort of the sunlight glancing off the same rows of copperware it glanced off before I was born into this world. I would not be myself if I did not feel the seductions of the cool stone house, the comfortable old ways, the antique feudal language. Perhaps, despite my black clothes and the steel in my heart (unless it is stone, who can tell when it is so far away), I am a conserver rather than a destroyer, perhaps my rage at my father is simply rage at the violations, of the old language, the correct language, that take place when he exchanges kisses and the pronouns of intimacy with a girl who yesterday scrubbed the floors and today ought to be cleaning the windows.

            90. But this, like so much else about me, is only theory. Let me at all costs not immure myself in a version of myself as avenger, eyes flashing and sword on high, of the old ways. It is the hermit crab, I remember from a book, that as it grows migrates from one empty shell to another. The grim moralist with the fiery sword is only a stopping-place, a little less temporary than the haggard wife knitting on the stoep, a little more temporary than the wild woman of the veld who talks to her friends the insects and walks in the midday sun, but temporary all the same. Whose shell I presently skulk in does not matter, it is the shell of a dead creature. What matters is that my anxious softbodied self should have a refuge from the predators of the deep, from the squid, the shark, the baleen whale, and whatever else it is that preys on the hermit crab, I do not know the oceans, though one day when I am a widow or a monied spinster I promise myself I will spend a day at the seaside. I will pack a basket with sandwiches and fill my purse with money and climb aboard the train and tell the man I want to see the sea: that gives you some idea of how naive I am. I will take off my shoes and crunch through the seasand, wondering at the millions of tiny deaths that have gone to make it up. I will roll up my skirts and wade in the shallows and be nipped by a crab, a hermit crab, as a cosmic joke, and stare at the horizon, and sigh at the immensity of it all, and eat my sandwiches, barely tasting the crisp sourdough bread, the sweet green fig preserve, and think on my insignificance. Then, chastened, sober, I will catch the train back home and sit on the stoep and watch the flaming sunsets, the crimsons, the pinks, the violets, the oranges, the bloody reds, and heave a sigh and sink my head on my breast and weep hesperian tears for myself, for the life I have not lived, the joy and willingness of an unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury, for the slowing pulse of my blood. I will get up out of the canvas chair and trail off to my bedroom and undress by the last light, saving paraffin, and sighing, sighing fall at once asleep. I will dream of a stone, a pebble lying on the beach, on the acres of white sand, looking into the benign blue sky, lulled by the waves; but, whether I will really have had the dream, I will never know, for all nightly happenings will be washed from my memory with the crowing of the cock. Or perhaps I shall not sleep at all, but lie tossing and turning with the toothache after all those sugary figs; for we pay no heed to hygiene here, but walk, around with foul-smelling breath and in due course with rotten stumps of teeth, wondering what to do with ourselves, until at last we are driven to the extremity of the farrier's tongs, or to oil of cloves on a matchstick, or to weeping, Weeping I have avoided hitherto, but there is a time and a place for everything; I am sure it will come to weeping one day when I am left alone on the farm, when they have all gone, Hendrik and his wife, Anna and Jakob, my father, my mother, the ratlike grandchildren, and I can wander about the house carefree in my shift, and out into the yard, and into the deserted sheep-runs, and into the hills: then will be a time for weeping and for tearing my hair and gnashing my gums without fear of detection or reprisal, without having to keep up a front. That will be the time for testing these lungs I have never tested, to hear whether they can make the hills echo, and the flats, if flats can echo, with their shrieks and groans and indents. That too, who knows, may be the time for tearing up my clothes, for building a great bonfire in front of the house of clothes and furniture and pictures, my father and my mother and my long-lost brother crinkling in the flames among the antimacassars, and for screaming with wild glee as the flames soar into the night sky, and even perhaps for carrying firebrands into the house, for firing the mattresses and the wardrobes and the yellowwood ceilings and the loft with its links full of mementos, until even the neighbours, whoever they may be, see the tower of flames on the horizon and come galloping through the darkness to bear me off to a place of safety, a cackling, gibbering old woman who wanted notice taken of her.

            91. The schoolhouse is empty. The ashes in the grate are old. The rack above the stove is bare. The bed is stripped. The shutter flaps. Jakob and Anna are gone. They have been sent packing. They have gone without even speaking to me. I watch the motes of dust dreamily ascend a shaft of sunlight.There is what tastes like blood at the back of my nose but is not. Truly, events have a power to move unmatched by one's darkest imaginings. I stand in the doorway breathing fast.

            92. The schoolhouse. Once upon, a time this was a real schoolhouse. Children came from the homestead to sit here and learn the three Rs. In summer they yawned and stretched and fidgeted while the heat buzzed in their ears. On winter mornings they picked their way across the frosty earth and chafed chilled bare toes together during the psalm-singing. The children of the neighbours came too, paying in cash and kind. There was a schoolmistress, daughter of an impoverished clergyman, no doubt, sent out to earn a living when one day she ran away with a passing Englishman and was never heard of again. After that there were no more schoolmistresses. For many years the schoolhouse stood unused, bats and starlings and spiders gradually taking it over, until one day it was turned over to Anna and Jakob, or to the Anna and Jakob who came before them, to live in. It cannot be otherwise, if I am simply sucking this history out of my thumb how am I to explain those three wooden benches stacked at the far end of the room, and the easel behind them on which Jakob used to hang his coat? Someone must have built and stocked a schoolhouse, and advertised for a schoolmistress in the Weekly Advertiser or the Colonial Gazette, and met her train, and installed her in the guestroom and paid her stipend, in order that the children of the desert should not grow up barbarian but be heirs of all the ages familiar with the rotation of the earth, Napoleon, Pompeii, the reindeer herds of the frozen wastes, the anomalous expansion of water, the seven days of Creation, the immortal comedies of Shakespeare, geometric and arithmetic progressions, the major and minor modes, the boy with his finger in the dyke, Rumpelstiltskin, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the laws of perspective, and much much more. But, where has it all gone now, this cheerful submission to the wisdom of the past? How many generations can have intervened, between those children chanting the six times table and my dubious self? Could my father have been one of them? If I hauled those benches into the light would I find, beneath the dust, his initials hacked, into the wood with a penknife? But if so, where has all the humane learning gone? What did he learn from Hansel and Gretel about fathers who lead their daughters into dark forests? What did Noah teach him about fornication? What did the six times table tell him about the iron laws of the universe? And even if it was not he but my grandfather who sat on these benches and sang out his tables, why did he pass on no humanity to my father but leave him a barbarian, and me too after him? Or is it possible that we are not aboriginal here, my line? Did my father or my grandfather perhaps simply gallop up pistolled and bandoliered to the farmhouse one day, out of nowhere, and fling down a tobacco pouch of gold nuggets, and shoo the schoolmistress out of the schoolhouse, and install his hands in her place, and institute a reign of brutishness? Or am I wrong, quite wrong? Was I the one who attended school here sitting in the darkest corner draped in spiderwebs while my brothers and sisters, my many brothers and sisters, as well as the children from the neighbouring farms, clamoured to have a turn to tell the story of Noah; and have I put them all from my mind utterly, because of their happy laughter, or because they stuffed caterpillars down the back of my bottlegreen smock to punish me for my sour face and my hatred of games; and have they determined nevermore to communicate with me, but to leave me behind with my father in the desert while they make their fortunes in the city? How hard to believe this. If I have brothers and sisters they cannot be in the city, they must all have been swept away by the great meningitis epidemic; for I cannot believe that fraternal intercourse would not have left its mark upon me, and it has all too plainly not left its mark upon me, the mark that has been left upon me instead is the mark of intercourse with the wilds, with solitude and vacancy. Nor can I believe that I was ever told the story of Noah, to speak of Noah only, sitting in a ring with the other children. My learning has the reek of print, not the resonance of the full human voice telling its stories. But perhaps our teacher was not a good teacher, perhaps she slumped, sullen at her table tapping the cane in the palm of her hand, brooding over insults, dreaming of escape, while her pupils picked their way through their reading-books and one could hear a pin drop. For how else could I have learned to read, to say nothing of writing?

            93. Or perhaps they were stepbrothers, perhaps that explains everything, perhaps that is the truth. It certainly has more of the ring of truth, if I can trust my ear: perhaps they were my stepbrothers and stepsisters, children of a buxom, blond much-loved wife who passed away in her prime; perhaps, themselves bold and blond and buxom and repelled by all that was shadowy and uncertain, they waged incessant war on the offspring of the mousy unloved second wife who died in childbirth. Then later, having imbibed all that their governess could offer, they were swept off en masse by a bluff maternal uncle to live happily ever after, leaving me behind to watch over my father's last years. And I have forgotten this horde not because I hated them but because I loved them and they were taken from me. In my dark corner I used to sit openmouthed devouring their robust gaiety, hoarding up memories of all the shouting and laughter so that if my lonely bed I could relive the day and tag it to me. But of all my stepbrothers and stepsisters it was Arthur I loved most. If Arthur had thrashed me I would, have squirmed with pleasure. If Arthur had thrown a stone I would have run to fetch it. For Arthur I would have eaten bootblacking, drunk urine. But alas, golden Arthur never noticed me, occupied as he was with winning the race and catching the ball and reciting the six times table. The day that Arthur left I hid in the darkest corner of the wagonhouse vowing that never another morsel of food, would pass my lips. As the years went by and Arthur did not return, I thrust his memory farther and farther from me, til today it recurs to me with all the remoteness of a fairy-tale. End of story. There are inconsistencies in it, but I have not the time to track down and abolish them, there is something that tells me I must get out of this schoolhouse and back to my own room.

            94. I close the door, sit down, and, confront with unweeping eyes the patch of wallpaper above the desk where glows no image of golden Arthur and myself running hand in hand on the seashore, but a pink, rose with two green leaves in a field of identical pink roses casting their light eternally into the uncomprehending space of the cubicle and on to the roses on the other walls. This is the irreducible, this is my room (I settle deep in my chair), and I do not wish that it should ever change: for the comfort of my dark days, the consolation that keeps me from closing my eyes, folding my arms, and rocking myself forever into vacancy, is the knowledge that from me and from me only do these flowers draw the energy that enables them to commune with themselves, with each other, in their ecstasy of pure being, just as the stones and bushes of the veld hum with life with such happiness that happiness is not the word, because I am here to set them vibrating with their own variety of material awareness that I am forever not they, and they not I, that I can never be the rapture of pure self that they are but am alas forever set off from them by the babble of words within me that fabricate and refabricate me as something else, something else. The farm, the desert, the whole world as far as the horizon is in an ecstasy of communion with itself, exalted by the vain urge of my consciousness to inhabit it. Such are the thoughts I think looking at the wallpaper, waiting for my breath to settle, for the fear to go away. Would that I had never learned to read.

            95. But the beast is not enchanted by my prattle. From hour to hour he stalks me through the afternoon. I hear his velvet pad, smell his fetid breath. It is useless, if I go on running I will only perish the more ignominiously, borne down from behind in a cascade of underwear, screaming until my neck is broken, if it is a merciful beast, or until my bowels are clawed out, if it is not. Somewhere on the farm my father roams, burning with shame, ready to strike dead on the spot whoever wags a finger at him. Is my father the beast? Elsewhere on the farm loom Hendrik and Anna, he playing his mouthorgan in the shade of a tree, that is how I still imagine him, she humming to herself, picking her toes, waiting for what is to happen next. Is Hendrik the beast, the insulted husband; the serf trodden under his master's boot, rising to roar for vengeance? Anna, with her sharp little teeth, her hot armpits--is she the beast, the woman, subtle, lascivious, Insatiable? I talk and talk to keep my spirits up while they circle me, smiling, powerful. What is the secret of their power over me? What do they know that I do not know? Whatever way I turn I am blocked. In a month's time, I can see it, I will be bringing my father and my maid breakfast in bed while Hendrik lounges in the kitchen eating biscuits, flicking his claspknife into the tabletop, pinching my bottom as I pass. My father will buy new dresses for her while I wash out her soiled underwear. He and she will lie abed all day sunk in sensual sloth while Hendrik tipples, jackals devour the sheep, and the work of generations falls to ruins. She will bear him olive-skinned children who will pee on the carpets and run up and down the passages. She will conspire with Hendrik to steal his money and his silver watch. They will send for their relatives, brothers and sisters, and distant cousins, and settle them on the farm. Through a crack in the shutter I will watch them dance in hordes to guitar music on Saturday nights while the old master sits like an idiot on the stoep smiling and nodding, president of the festival.

            96. Who is the beast among us? My stories are stories, they do not frighten me, they only postpone the moment when I must ask: Is it my own snarl I hear in the undergrowth? Am I the one to fear, ravening, immoderate, because here in the heart of the country where space radiates out from me to all the four corners of the earth there is nothing that can stop me? As I sit quietly gazing at my roses waiting for the afternoon to end I find that hard to accept. But I am not quite such a fool as to believe in what I see; and if I attune myself carefully to what is passing inside me I can surely feel far away the withered apple of my womb rise and float, boding all ill. I may be only a ninety-pound spinster crazed with loneliness, but I suspect I am not harmless. So perhaps that is a true explanation of my fear, a fear that is also an expectancy: I fear what I am going to do, nevertheless I am going to do whatever I do because if I do not, but creep away till better days come, my life will continue to be a line trickling from nowhere to nowhere, without beginning or end. I want a life of my own, just as I am sure my father said to himself he wanted a life of his own when he bought the packet of hearts and diamonds. The world is full of people who want to make their own lives, but to few outside the desert is such freedom granted. Here in the middle of nowhere I can expand to infinity just as I can shrivel to the size of an ant. Many things I lack, but freedom is not one of them.

            97. But while I have sat here daydreaming, perhaps even dozing with my cheeks propped on my fists and my gums bared, the afternoon has been sliding away, the light is no longer green but grey, and it is by footsteps and voices that I have been jolted awake. Confused, my heart hammers; foul and sticky from the afternoon's torpor, my mouth floods with salt.

            I open the door a crack. The voices are at the far end of the house. One is my father's, issuing commands. I know the tones though I can make out no words. There is a second voice, but I know of it only through the silences of the first.

            It is as I feared. The magic of imagining the worst has not worked. The worst is here.

            Now those booted feet come up the passage. I close the door and push against it. I have known that tread all my life, yet I stand with mouth agape and pulse drumming. He is turning me into a child again! The boots, the thud of the boots, the black brow, the black eyeholes, the black hole of the mouth from which roars the great NO, iron, cold, thunderous, that blasts me and buries me and locks me up; I am a child again, an infant, a grub, a white shapeless life with no arms, no legs, nothing even to grip the earth with, a sucker, a claw; I squirm, again the boot is raised over me, the mouthhole opens, and the great wind blows, chilling me to my pulpy heart. Though I am leaning against the door he has only to push and I will fall. The core of anger in me is gone, I am afraid, there is no mercy for me, I will be punished and never consoled afterwards. Two minutes ago I was right and he was wrong, I was the dozing fury in the stiff chair waiting to confront him with silence, absence, contempt, and who knows what else; but now I am wrong again, wrong, wrong, wrong as I have been since I was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wrong body. Tears roll down my cheeks, my nose is stuffed, it is no good, I wait for the man on the other side of the door to decide for me what form tonight s misery is to take.

            98. He knocks, three light clicks of fingernail on wood. Salt floods my mouth again; I huddle, holding my breath. Then he goes away: the even footsteps recede one, two, three... down the passage. So this is my punishment! He did not want to see me, but to lock me away for the night! Cruel, cruel, cruel! I weep in my cell.

            Again the voices come to me. They are in the kitchen. He tells her to put food on the table. She takes bread out of the breadsafe, fat and a bottle of preserves out of the cupboard. He tells her to boil water. She cannot make the paraffin stove work, she tells him. He lights the stove for her. She puts the kettle on the flame. She clasps her hands and waits for the water. He tells her to sit. She is going to sit at table with him. He has cut a slice of bread which he pushes toward her with the point of the knife. He tells her to eat. His voice is gruff. He cannot express tenderness. He expects people to understand this and allow for it, but no one understands it, no one but I, who have sat in corners all my life watching him. I know that his rages and moody silences can only be masks for a tenderness he dare not show lest he be overwhelmed in its consequences. He hates only because he dare not love. He hates in order to hold himself together. He is not a bad man, despite all. He is not unjust. He is merely an ageing man who has had little love and who thinks he has now found it, eating bread and peaches with his girl, waiting for the coffee water to boil. No scene more peaceful can be imagined, if one ignores the bitter child straining her ears behind the door at the far end of the house. It is a love-feast they are having; but there is one feast which is nobler than the love-feast, and that is the family meal. I should have been invited too. I should be seated at that table, at the foot properly, since I am mistress of the household; and she, not I, should have to fetch and carry. Then we might break bread in peace, and be loving to one another in our different ways, even I. But lines have been drawn. I am excluded from communion, and so this has become a house of two stories, a story of happiness or a lunge toward happiness, and a story of woe.

            99. Their spoons tinkle in concert. They have sweet teeth, both of them. Through wisps of steam their eyes meet. Behind her she has a week of knowledge of this strange man, mountainous, hairy, flaccid, decaying, powerful, who tonight comes into the open full of bravado to announce her as his concubine, his property. Does she think of her husband at all, rolled in a blanket beneath the cold stars or groaning in his forlorn cottage, as her new owner's knees enfold her under the table? Does she ask herself how long he will protect her from her husband's anger? Does she think at all about the future; or did she learn at her mother's breast to live and be damned in the luxury of the present? What does this new man mean to her? Does, she merely part her thighs, stolid, dull-nerved, because he is the master, or are there refinements of pleasure in subjection which wedded love can never give? Is she giddy with her sudden elevation? Have his gifts intoxicated her, the coins, the candies, whatever he has picked out for her from his wife's aftermath, a feather boa, a rhinestone necklace? Why have those relics never come to me? Why is everything secret from me? Why should I not sit too at the kitchen table smiling and being smiled on, in the warm haze of coffee fumes? What is there for me after my purgatory of solitude? Will they wash the dishes before they retire, or will I have to come out in the middle of the night like a cockroach, to clean up after them? When will she begin to test her power, when will she sigh and get up from the table and stretch and drift away, leaving the mess for the servant? The day when she does that, will he dare to bark at her, or will he be so besotted that only the allure of her haunches as she ripples toward their bedroom will have any meaning for him? If she ceases to be the servant who will be the servant but I, unless I run away into the night and never come back, but die in the desert and am picked clean by the birds, followed by the ants, as a reproach? Will he even notice? Hendrik will light on me in his wanderings and bring me back in a sack. They will tip me into a hole and cover me up and say a prayer. Then she will light the fire and put on an apron and wash the dishes, the great mound of dishes, coffee-cup upon coffee-cup that I left behind, and sigh and begrudge me my death.

            100. I toss about in the dark whipping myself into distraction. Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective. Once upon a time I might have shaken off the fit and, pale, tearstained, vacant, dragged myself down the passage to confront them. Then the erotic spell would have been broken, the girl would have slipped out of her chair, my father would have seated me and given me something to drink to restore me. The girl might even have vanished into the night: all would have been well again, the moment postponed when the door clicks shut behind the two of them and I know finally I am excluded from a room I have never been good enough to enter. But tonight I have beaten the waters too long, I am weak, and tired of telling myself things, tonight I am going to relax, give up, explore the pleasures of drowning, the feel of my body sliding out of me and another body sliding in, limbs inside my limbs, mouth inside my mouth. I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me, drones or bubbles or whatever it is that words do in water. What tedium! When will it ever stop? The moon shines on the black folds of a woman on a cold floor. From her rises like a miasma a fiend of ashen face. The words that whisper through those blue lips are mine, Drowning, I drown into myself. A phantom, I am no phantom. I stoop. I touch this skin and it is warm, I pinch this flesh and it hurts: What more proof could I want? I am I.

            101. I stand outside the door of their room, three bland panels and a china knob over which my hand hovers. They know I am here. The air is alive with my presence. They freeze in their guilty posture, waiting for me to act. I tap on the door and speak.

            " Daddy... Can you hear me?"

            They are silent, listening to the enormity of their breathing.

            "Daddy, I can't sleep."

            They look into each other's eyes, his look saying, What must I do?, her look saying, "She is not mine. "

            "Daddy, I'm feeling strange. What shall I do?"

            102. I trail back to the kitchen. Moonlight strikes through the uncurtained window on to the bare table. In the sink lie a plate and two cups waiting to be washed. The coffeepot is still warm. I could drink coffee too, if I felt like it.

            103. I caress the white doorknob. My hand is clammy.

            "Daddy... Can I say something?" I turn the knob. The latch moves but the door does not open. They have locked it. I hear him breathing on the other side of the door. I knock heavily with the side of my fist. He clears his throat and speaks evenly; "It's late, child. Let us rather talk tomorrow. Go and get some sleep."

            He has spoken. Having found it necessary to lock the door against me, he has now found it necessary to speak to me.

            I thump heavily again. What will he do? The lock snaps open. Through the crack his arm snakes out at me milky white above the dark hair. Instantly he has my wrist in his grasp and crushes it with all the strength of that great hand. I wince, but I will never cry out. What sounds like a cascade of corn-shucks is his whisper, rasping, furious.

            "Go to bed! Do you understand what I say?"

            "No! I don't feel like sleeping!"

            These are not my tears, they are merely tears that pass through me, as the urine I pass is merely urine.

            The great hand slides up my arm till it finds and grips my elbow. I am forced down and down; my head is against the doorjamb. I feel no pain. Things are happening in my life, it is better than solitude, I am content.

            "Now stop it! Stop irritating me! Go away!"

            I am flung back. The door slams. The key turns.

            104. I squat against the wall opposite the door. My head lolls. From my throat comes something which is not a cry, not a groan, not a voice, but a wind that blows from the stars and over the polar wastes and through me. The wind is white, the wind is black, it says nothing.

            105. My father stands over me. Clothed, he is his complete masterful self. My dress is rucked up, he can see my knees and the black socks and shoes in which my legs end. I do not, on the whole, care what he sees. The wind still whistles through me, but softly now.

            "Come on, child, let's go to bed now." The tones are gentle, but I who hear everything hear their angry edge and know how spurious they are.

            He catches my wrist and draws my limp puppet-body up. If he lets go I will fall. What happens to this body I do not care. If he wants to stamp it to pulp beneath his heels I will not protest. I am a thing that he holds by the shoulders and steers down the passage to the cell at the farthest end. The passage is endless, our footsteps thunder, the cold wind eats steadily at my face, devouring the tears that drip from me. The wind blows everywhere, it issues from every hole, it turns everything to stone, to the stone, glacial, chilled to the core, of the remotest stars, the stars we shall never see, living their lives from infinity to infinity in darkness and ignorance, if I am not confusing them with planets. The wind blows out of my room, through the keyhole, through the cracks; when that door opens I shall be consumed by it, I shall stand in the mouth of that black vortex without hearing, without touch, engulfed by the wind that roars in the spaces between the atoms of my body, whistles in the cavern behind my eyes.

            106. On the familiar green counterpane he lays me down. He lifts my feet and prises my shoes off. He smooths my dress. What more can he do? What more dare he do? Those gentle tones come again.

            "Come, sleep now, my child, it is getting late. " His hand is on my forehead, the horny hand of a man who bends wire. How tender, how comforting! But what he wants to know is whether I am feverish, whether at the root of my desolation lies a microbe. Should I tell him there are no microbes in me, my flesh is too sour to harbour them?

            107. He has left me. I lie exhausted while the world spins round and round my bed. I have spoken and been spoken to, touched and been touched. Therefore I am more than just the trace of the words passing through my head on their way from nowhere to nowhere, a streak of light against the void of space, a shooting-star (how full of astronomy I am this evening). So what is the reason that I do not simply turn over and go to sleep as I am, fully dressed, and wake up in the morning and wash the dishes and efface myself and wait for my reward; which must undoubtedly come if justice is to reign in the universe? Alternatively, what is the reason that I do not fall asleep turning over and over in my mind the question of why it is that I do not simply go to sleep as I am, fully dressed?

            108. The dinner bell is in its place on the sideboard. I would have preferred something larger, a loud jangling bell, a school bell; perhaps hidden, in the loft somewhere is the old school-bell, coated in dust, awaiting the resurrection, if there ever was a school; but I have no time to search it out (though would their hearts not be sent leaping into their mouths if they heard the scuttle of mousepaws, the shuffle of bats wings, the ghostly tread of the avenger above their bed?). Quiet as a cat, barefoot, muffling the clapper, I creep up the passage and put my ear to the keyhole. All is silent. Are they lying with bated breath, with two breaths bated, waiting for me to make my move? Are they asleep already? Or are they lying in each other's arms? Is that how it is done, in motions too tiny for the ear to hear, like flies glued together?

            109. The bell makes a thin continuous genteel tinkle. When I am tired of ringing it with the right hand I change it to the left. I feel better than when I last stood here. I am more tranquil. I begin to hum, at first wavering this side and that of the bell-tone, then finding its level and staying there.

            110. Time drifts past, a mist that thins, thickens, and is sucked into the dark ahead. What I think of as my pain, though it is only loneliness, begins to go away. The bones of my face are thawing, I am growing soft again, a soft human animal, a mammal. The bell has found a measure, four soft, four loud, to which I am beginning to vibrate; first the grosser muscles, then the subtler. My woes are leaving me. Small stick-like creatures, they crawl out of me and dwindle.

            111. All will yet be well.

            112. I am hit. That is what has happened. I am hit a heavy blow on the head. I smell blood, my ears ring. The bell is torn from my hand. I hear it strike the floor, clamorously, far down the passage, and roll left and right as bells do. The passage echoes flatly with shouts which make no sense to me. I slide down the wall and sit carefully on the floor. Now I can taste the blood. My nose is bleeding. I am swallowing blood, also, when I stick my tongue out, tasting it on my lips.

            When was I last struck a blow? I cannot think when. Perhaps I have never been struck before, perhaps I have only been cherished, though that is difficult to believe, cherished and reproved and neglected. The blow does not hurt but it insults, I am insulted and outraged. A moment ago I was a virgin and now I am not, with respect to blows.

            The shouting still hangs in the air, like heat, like smoke. If I want to I can reach up and wave my hand in its thickness.

            Over me looms a huge white sail. The air is dense with noise. I close my eyes and every other aperture I can. The noise filters into me; I am beginning to jangle. My stomach revolts.

            There is another blow, wood on wood. Far, far away a key clatters. The air still rings, though I am by myself.

            I have been dealt with. I was a nuisance and now I am dealt with. That is something to think about while I have time on my hands, find my old place against the wall, comfortable, hazy, even languorous. Whether, when the thinking begins, it will be thought or dream I cannot guess.

            There are vast regions of the world where, if one is to believe what one reads, it is always snowing.

            Somewhere, in Siberia or Alaska, there is a field, snow-covered, and in the middle of it a pole, aslant, rotten. Though it may be midday the light is so dim that it could be evening. The snow sifts down endlessly. Otherwise there is nothing as far as the eye can see.

            113. In what is properly the hatrack by the front door, in the place where umbrellas would stand if we ever used umbrellas, if our response to rain here were not to lift our faces to it and catch the sultry drops in our mouths and rejoice, stand the two guns, the two-bore shotgun for the partridge and the hare, and the one known as the Lee-Enfield. The Lee-Enfield is graduated to 2000 yards. I marvel.

            Where the shotgun cartridges are kept, I do not know. But in the little drawer of the hatrack, where they have lain, for years among odd buttons and pins, are six.303 cartridges with sharp bronze noses. I find them by touch.

            One would not think it, looking at me, that I know how to use a gun, but I do. There are several things about me one would not think. I am not sure that I can load a magazine in the dark, but I can slip a single cartridge into the breech and slide the bolt to. My palms are unpleasantly clammy for someone who is normally dry to the point of scaliness.

            114. I am not easy though I find myself in action. A vacuum slipped into me somewhere. Nothing that is now happening satisfies me. I was satisfied while I stood ringing the bell and humming in the dark, but I doubt that if I went hack and groped about and found the bell under the furniture and wiped off the cobwebs and stood ringing it and humming I would recover that happiness. Certain things seem to be forever irrecoverable. Perhaps that proves the reality of the past.

            115. I am not easy. I cannot believe in what is happening to me. I give my head a shake and suddenly cannot see why I should not be spending the night in my bed asleep; I cannot see why my father should not spend the night in his own bed asleep, and Hendrik's wife the night in her own bed, and Hendrik's, asleep. I cannot see a necessity behind what we are doing, any of us. We are no more than whim, one whim after another. Why can we not accept that our lives are vacant, as vacant as the desert we live in, and spend them counting sheep or washing cups with blithe hearts? I do not see why the story of our lives should have to be interesting. I am having second thoughts about everything.

            116. The bullet rests snug in its chamber. Wherein does my own corruption lie? For, having paused for my second thoughts, I will certainly proceed as before. Perhaps what I lack is the resolution to confront not the tedium of pots and pans and the same old pillow every night but a history so tedious in the telling that it might as well be a history of silence. What I lack is the courage to stop talking, to die back into the silence I came from. The history that I make, loading this heavy gun, is only a frantic spurious babble. Am I one of those people so insubstantial that they cannot reach out of themselves save with bullets? That is what I fear as I slip out, an implausible figure, an armed lady, into the starlit night.

            117. The yard is awash with silver-blue light. The whitewashed walls of the storehouse and wagonhouse shine with a ghostly pallor. Far away in the lands the blades of the windmill glint. The groan and thud of the piston reaches me faint but clear on the night breeze. The beauty of the world I live in takes my breath away. Similarly, one reads, the scales fall off the eyes of condemned men as they walk to the gallows or the block, and in a moment of great purity, keening with regret that they must die, they yet give thanks for having lived. Perhaps I should change my allegiance from sun to moon.

            One sound that I hear, however, does not belong here. Now fainter, now stronger, it is the sound of a distempered dog whining and growling and panting without cease; but it comes not from a dog but from an ape or a human being or several human beings somewhere behind the house.

            Holding the gun before me like a tray I tiptoe through the gravel, circling the wagonhouse and coming out in the rear. All along the wall of the house is a bank of shadow. In the shadow against the kitchen door lies whatever it is, not dog or ape but man, in fact (I see as I approach) Hendrik, the one man who ought not to be here. His noise, his babbling, if that is the word, ceases as he sees me. He makes a play of rising as I approach, but falls back. He stretches his hands towards me palms outward.

            "Don't shoot!" he says. It is his joke.

            My finger does not leave the trigger. I am, for the time being, not to be taken in by appearances. A stench rises from him, not wine but brandy. Only from my father can he have got brandy. Bribed, therefore, not tricked.

            With a hand behind him against the kitchen door he tries again to rise. His hat falls out of his lap on to the ground. He stretches for it and collapses slowly on to his side.

            "It's me," he says, putting out his free hand toward the muzzle of the gun, which is far beyond his reach. I take a step back.

            Lying on his side on the doorstep with his knees drawn up he forgets me and begins to sob. That, then, is what the noise was. At each tremor his heels give a little kick.

            There is nothing I can do for him. "You are going to get cold, Hendrik," I say.

            118. The door of my father's room is locked against me but the window is open, as ever. I have had enough, tonight, of listening to the sounds that other people make. Therefore it is necessary to act swiftly, without thinking, and, since I cannot plug my ears, to hum softly to myself. I slide the barrel of the rifle between the curtains. Resting the stock on the windowsill I elevate the gun until it points very definitely toward the far ceiling of the room and, closing my eyes, pull the trigger.

            I have never been privileged to hear a firearm discharged indoors before. I am used to wave after wave of echoes coming back at me from the hills. But now there is simply the jerk of the butt against my shoulder, the concussion, flat, unremarkable, and then a moment of silence before the first of the screams.

            While I listen I sniff in the cordite fumes. Ironstone chipped against ironstone invokes a spark and a wisp of the same heady smoke.

            119. In fact I have never heard a scream like this before. It fills the dark chamber with its brilliance and glares through the walls as if they were glass. Exhausting itself in tiny yip-yips, it bursts open, immediately again. I am amazed. I would not have believed one could scream so loudly.

            The bolt comes back, the spent case tinkles at my feet, the second cartridge, cool, alien, slips into the breech.

            The screams grow shorter, they are acquiring a rhythm. There are also numerous angry lower sounds without rhythm, which I shall separate later, when I have time, if I can recall them.

            I elevate the barrel, close my eyes, and pull the trigger. At the same instant the rifle jerks out of my hands. The detonation is even flatter than before. The whole rifle leaves me, surprisingly. It snakes through the curtains and is gone. I rest on my knees empty-handed.

            120. I should leave now. I have caused enough trouble, my stomach is unpleasantly excited, the night is spoiled for them, I will undoubtedly have to pay. For the present it would be best if I were by myself.

            121. Hendrik stands in the moonlight in the middle of the yard watching me. There is no knowing what he thinks.

            In cool, well-formed words I speak to him. "Go to bed, Hendrik. It is late. Tomorrow is another day." He sways, his face shadowed by his hat. The screaming has devolved into shouting. It would be best for all of us if I left. I circle Hendrik and take the road that leads away from the farmhouse, or if one prefers to look at it in another way, that leads into the greater world. At first my back feels vulnerable, but later on less so.

            122. Is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do, and that that explanation lies inside me, like a key rattling in a can, waiting to be taken out and used to unlock the mystery? Is the following the key: through the agency of conflict with my father I hope to lift myself out of the endless middle of meditation on unattached existence into a true agony with crisis and resolution? If so, do I wish to employ the key, or do I wish to drop it quietly by the roadside and never see it again? And is it not remarkable how at one moment I can be walking away from a scene of crisis, from gunfire and screaming and interrupted pleasures, my shoes scuffling the pebbles, the moon's rays bearing down on me like bars of silver, the night breeze growing chilly, and at the next moment I can be lost to things and back in the gabble of words? Am I, I wonder, a thing among things, a body propelled along a track by sinews and bony levers, or am I a monologue moving through time, approximately five feet above the ground, if the ground does not turn out to be just another word, in which case I am indeed lost? Whatever the case, I am plainly not myself in as clear a way as I might wish. When will I live down tonight's behaviour? I should have kept my peace or been less half-hearted. My distaste for Hendrik's grief showed my half-heart. A woman with red blood in her veins (what colour is mine? a watery pink? an inky violet?) would have pushed a hatchet into his hands and bundled him into the house to search out vengeance. A woman determined to be the author of her own life would not have shrunk from hurling open the curtains and flooding the guilty deed with light, the light of the moon, the light of firebrands. But I, as I feared, hover ever between the exertions of drama and the languors of meditation. Though I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, I closed my eyes. It was not only a woman's faintness that made me act so, it was a private logic, a psychology which, meant to keep me from seeing my father's nakedness. (Perhaps It was this same psychology which made me incapable of reaching out, to comfort Hendrik.) (I have said nothing of the girl's nakedness. Why?) There is consolation in having a psychology--for has there ever been a creature blessed with a psychology yet without an existence?--but there is cause for unease too. Whose creature, in a tale of unconscious motives, would I be? My freedom is at risk, I am being worked into a corner by forces beyond my control, there will soon be nothing for me but to sit in a corner weeping and jerking my muscles. It makes no difference that the corner presents itself to me at this moment as a long walk on the open road: at the end of it I shall discover that the earth is round: corners have many shapes. I do not have the equipment for life on the road. That is to say, while I have the feet and legs, and while I would be deceiving myself if I claimed a need for sustenance--with locusts and rain-showers and the odd change of shoes I can go on to infinity--the truth is that I have no stomach for the people I shall meet, the innkeepers and postillions, and highwaymen, if that is the century I am in, and the adventures, the rapes and robberies, not that I have anything worth the robbing, not that I have anything worth the raping, that would be a scene to remember, though it happens to the most unexpected people. If, on the other hand, the road is forever as the road is now dark, winding, stony, if I can stumble along forever in the moonlight or the sunlight, whichever it is to be, without coming out at such places as Armoede or the station or the city where daughters are ruined, if, wonder of wonders, the road goes nowhere day after day, week after week, season after season, except perhaps, if I am lucky, to the lip of the world, then I might give myself to it, to the story of life on the road, without psychology, without adventure, without shape or form, slog slog slog in my old button-shoes, which fall to tatters but are at once replaced by the new button-shoes which hang on a string around my neck like two black breasts, with infrequent stops for locusts and rainwater and even less frequent stops for the calls of nature and yet other stops for slumber and dream-passages, without them we die, and the ribbon of my meditations, black on white, floating like a mist five feet above the ground, stretching back to the horizon--yes, to such a life I might give myself. If I knew that that was all that was required of me my step would quicken at once, my stride lengthen, my hips swing, I would fare forward with a glad heart and a smile. But I have reason to suspect, or perhaps not reason, this sphere is not a sphere of reason, I have a suspicion, a suspicion pure and simple, a groundless suspicion, that this road leads, if I take the right fork, to Armoede location, and if I take the left, to the station. And if I pick my way southward along the cross-ties I will one day find myself at the seaside and be able to walk on the beach listening to the wave-surge, or alternatively to march straight out to sea where, failing a miracle, propelled relentlessly by its ancillary mechanisms, my head will be submerged and the ribbon of words finally trail off forever in a welter of bubbles. And what am I going to say to the folk on the train who look at me so strangely because of the spare shoes around my neck, because of the locusts that spring out of my handbag--the kindly old silver-haired gentleman, the fat lady in black cotton who dabs her perspiring upper lip with the daintiest of handkerchiefs, the stiff youth who looks so intently at me and might at any moment, depending on the century, be revealed as my long-lost brother or my seducer or even both? What words have I for them? I part my lips, they see my mottled teeth, they smell my carious gums, they blanch as there roars at them the old cold black wind that blows from nowhere to nowhere out of me endlessly.

            123. My father is sitting on the floor with his back against the footboard of the great double bed in which so much of the engendering in our family has been carried out. To the waist he is naked. His flesh is lilywhite. His face, which ought to be of the same brick-brown as his forearms, is yellow. He is looking straight at me where I stand, hand to mouth, in the first morning light.

            The rest of his body is draped in green. He has pulled the green curtains down, the curtain-rod too, that is why the room is so bright. It is the curtain which he is holding around his middle.

            We look at each other. Try as I will, I cannot work out what feelings his face expresses. I lack the faculty of reading faces.

            124. I go through the house closing doors: two living-room doors, two dining-room doors, bedroom door, bedroom door, sewing-room door, study door, bathroom door, bedroom door, kitchen door, pantry door, door of my room.

            Some of the doors are already closed.

            125. The cups have not yet been washed.

            126. There are flies in my father's room. The air is heavy with their buzzing. They crawl on his face and he does not brush them away, he who has always been a fastidious man. They cluster on his hands, which are red with blood. There are splashes of dried blood on the floor and the curtain is caked with blood. I am not squeamish about blood, I have made blood-sausage on occasion, but in this case I am not sure it would not be better to leave the room for a while, to take a stroll, to clear my head. However, I stay, I am held here.

            He speaks, clearing his throat lengthily. "Fetch Hendrik," he says. "Tell Hendrik to come, please."

            He does not resist when I uncurl his fingers from the bloody wad of curtain be holds against himself. In his belly there is a hole big enough to slide my thumb into. The flesh around it is scorched.

            His hand catches a corner of the curtain and covers his sex.

            It is my fault again. I cannot do right. I put the wad back.

            127. I am running now as I have not run since childhood, fists clenched, arms pumping, legs toiling through the grey sand of the riverbed. I am wholly involved in my mission, action without reflection, a hundred-pound animal hurling itself through space under the impulse of disaster.

            128. Hendrik is asleep on the bare ticking. Bending over him I am overwhelmed with the stench of liquor and urine. Into his dull ear I pant my message: "Hendrik wake up, get up! The baas has had an accident! Come and help!"

            He flails with his arms, striking me, shouting angry syllables, then falls back into his stupor. The girl is not here. Where is she? I begin to hurl things at Hendrik, a kettle, handfuls of spoons and knives, plates. I pick up the broom and ram the bristles into his face. He stumbles from the bed shielding himself with his arms. I thrust and thrust. "Listen to me when I speak to you!" I pant. I am beside myself with anger. Water ebbs from the kettle on to the mattress. He backs through the doorway and sprawls over the threshold. Dazzled by the sun he curls again on his side in the dust.

            "Where is the bottle? Tell me! Where is the brandy? Where did you get the brandy?" I stand over him with the broom, glad on the whole that no one is watching us, a grown man, a grown woman.

            "Let me alone, miss! I didn't steal anything!"

            "Where did you get the brandy?"

            "The baas gave it to me, miss! I don't steal."

            "Get up and listen to me. The baas has had an accident. Do you understand? You must come and help."

            He struggles to his feet, wavers, staggers, and falls. I lift the broom high. He raises a leg resentfully in defence.

            "Come on, for God's sake get a move on," I scream, "the baas will die, if you don't help, and then it won't be my fault!"

            "Just wait a moment, miss, it isn't easy."

            He makes no effort to rise. Lying on the ground he breaks into a smile.

            " You sot, you filthy sot, you're finished here, I swear it! Pack your things and get out! I don't want to see you here again." The broomhandle thuds against the sole of his shoe and spins out of my hands.

            129. I am panting and toiling through the riverbed again. Would that the river came roaring down in flood and washed us away, sheep and all, leaving the earth clean! Perhaps that is how the tale will end, if the house does not burn down first. But the last of the dawn mauve has been scorched away, we are in for yet another fine day. I would say that the sky is pitiless if I did not know that the sky is merely clear, the earth merely dry, the rocks merely hard. What purgatory to live in this insentient universe where everything but me is merely itself! I alone, the one speck not spinning blindly along but trying to create a life for itself amid this storm of matter, these bodies driven by appetite, this rural idiocy! My gorge rises, I am not used to running, I fart heavily in mid-stride. I should have lived in the city; greed there is a vice I can understand. In the city I would have room to expand; perhaps it is not too late, perhaps I can still run away to the city disguised as a man, a wizened beardless little man, to practise greed and make my fortune and find happiness, though the last is not likely.

            130. I stand heaving at the bedroom window. "Hendrik is not coming. He is drunk. Daddy should not have given him brandy, he is not used to the stuff."

            The rifle from last night lies on the floor near the window.

            His face is a liverish yellow. He sits as before clutching the curtain to him. He does not turn his head. There is no telling whether he has heard me.

            131. I kneel over him. He is looking at the blank wall, but his gaze is focussed somewhere beyond it, on infinity perhaps, or even on his redeemer. Is he dead? Despite all the smallpox and influenza in my life I have never seen anything larger than a pig die.

            His breath strikes my nostrils, feverish, foul. "Water, " he whispers.

            There are midges floating in the water-bucket. I scoop them off and drink a beakerful. Then I bring the full beaker back and hold it to his lips. He swallows it with reassuring energy.

            "Can I help Daddy to get into bed?" He is moaning to himself, gritting his teeth, one moan to each shallow breath. His toes, sticking out from under the curtain, curl and uncurl.

            "Help me," he whispers, "get the doctor quickly."

            Tears roll down his cheeks.

            I straddle him and, gripping him under the armpits, try to raise him. He gives me no help at all.

            He is crying like a baby.

            "Help me, help me, the pain is terrible! Quickly, get something to stop the pain!"

            "There is no more brandy. Daddy gave it all to Hendrik; now that we need it there isn't any."

            "Help me, child, I can't bear it, I have never had such pain!"

            132. My soles stick unpleasantly to the floor. I tramp about the house without plan or purpose, leaving marks which I shall have to clean.

            He is sitting in a pool of blood like a baby that has wet itself.

            133. A third time I cross the riverbed, trudging now, tired, fed up. I have the rifle slung over my shoulder. The butt bumps against my calves. I feel like an old campaigner, but wonder what I look like.

            Hendrik is lying flat on his back snoring. Another stinking man.

            "Hendrik, get up at once or I shoot. I am sick of your games. The baas needs you."

            When one truly means what one says, when one speaks not in shouts of panic, but quietly, deliberately, decisively, then one is understood and obeyed. How pleasing to have identified a universal truth. Hendrik gets groggily to his feet and follows me. I give him the rifle to carry. The cartridge in the breech is spent and has been since before midnight. I am harmless, despite appearances.

            134. "Hendrik, get him under the shoulders, then we can lift him on to the bed." With Hendrik at the shoulders and myself at the knees, we lift my father on to the tousled bed. He is groaning and talking to himself in delirium. I fetch a basin of water, a sponge, carbolic acid.

            What I have not seen is the gaping wound in his back from which blood seeps steadily. Petals of flesh stand out from it. I wash delicately around them. When the sponge touches raw flesh he jerks. But at least the bullet is out.

            There is not enough bandage for a wound of this size. With dressmaking shears I begin to cut a sheet into strips. It takes a long time, Hendrik fidgets until I tell him to wave the flies off his master. He does so self-consciously.

            While Hendrik raises the torso I cover the two holes with wads of lint and wind the bandage round and round the thick waist. The sex is smaller than I thought it would be, almost lost in a bush of black hair straggling up to the navel: a pale boy, a midget, a dwarf, an idiot son who, having survived for years shut away in the cellar, tasting only bread and water, talking to the spiders, singing to himself, is one night dressed in new clothes, set free, made much of, pampered, feasted, and then executed. Poor little thing. It is not possible to believe I came from there, or from whatever that puffy mass is below it. If I were told that I am an idea my father had many years ago and then, bored with it, forgot, I would be less incredulous, though still sceptical. I am better explained as an idea I myself had, also many years ago, and have been unable to shake off.

            Hendrik is embarrassed by my diligent hands and eyes, my dutiful hands and eyes, but all the same my woman's hands and eyes wandering so near this pale unprotected manhood. I am aware of his embarrassment, and turn and smile the first frank smile I have given him today, or perhaps in all the years I have known him. He lowers his eyes. Can brown-skinned people blush?

            Over my father's head I draw a clean nightshirt. With Hendrik's help I roll it down over his knees. Now he is clean and decent.

            "Now we can only wait and see, Hendrik. Go to the kitchen, I will come and make coffee in a moment."

            135. So all of a sudden here I am, at the centre of a field of moral tensions, they are no less, for which my upbringing has barely prepared me. What am I going to do? When he finds his balance Hendrik will want to know whether the accident is an eccentricity of the ruling caste or whether I am culpable and can be exploited. He will want to know who is most shamed, he or I, we or they, and who will pay more for silence. Klein-Anna, if she can ever be found, will want to know whether I am angered or frightened by her liaison with my father. She will want to know whether I am prepared to protect her from Hendrik and whether in future I will try to keep her away from my father. Jointly she and Hendrik will want to know whether they must leave the farm or whether the scandal is to be hushed up. My father will want to know what penitence I can be made to do; whether I will work upon the girl while he is out of the way; whether a fiction is to be brought Into being among the four of us to explain his injury, a hunting accident, for example. I will be watched by hooded eyes, my every word will be weighed, words will be spoken to me whose bland taste, whose neutral colour, whose opaque surface will fail to cover nuances of derision. Smiles will pass behind my back. A crime has been committed. There must be a criminal. Who is the guilty one? I am at a terrible disadvantage. Forces within me belonging to the psychology I so abhor will take possession of me and drive me to believe that I willed the crime, that I desired my father's death. With the dark subtle figures of Hendrik and Klein-Anna wagging their fingers behind me I shall find my days turned into a round of penitence. I shall find myself licking my father's wounds, bathing Klein-Anna and bringing her to his bed, serving Hendrik hand and foot. In the dark before dawn, drudgemaiden of a drudgemaiden, I shall stoke the fire, I shall serve them breakfast in bed and bless them, when they revile me. Already the snake has come and the old Eden is dead!

            136. I deceive myself. It is worse than that, far worse. He will never get well. What was once pastoral has become one of those stifling stories in which brother and sister, wife and daughter and concubine prowl and snarl around the bedside listening for the death-rattle, or stalk each other through the dim passages of the ancestral home. It is not fair! Born into a vacuum in time, I have no understanding of changing forms. My talent is all for immanence, for the fire or ice of identity at the heart of things. Lyric is my medium, not chronicle. As I stand in this room, I see not father and master dying on the bed but the sunlight reflected with unholy brilliance from his beaded forehead; I smell the odour that blood has in common with stone, with oil, with iron, the odour that folk travelling through space and time, inhaling and exhaling the black, the empty, the infinite, smell as they pass through the orbits of the dead planets, Pluto, Neptune, and those not yet discovered, so tiny are they and so remote, the odour that matter gives off when it is very old and wants to sleep. Oh father, father, if I could only learn your secrets, creep through the honeycomb of your bones, listen to the turmoil of your marrow, the singing of your nerves, float on the tide of your blood, and come at last to the quiet sea where my countless brothers and sisters swim, flicking their tails, smiling, whispering to me of a life to come! I want a second chance! Let me annihilate myself in you and come forth a second time clean and new, a sweet fish, a pretty baby, a laughing infant, a happy child, a gay girl, a blushing bride, a loving wife, a gentle mother in a story with beginning and end in a country town with kind neighbours, a cat on the doormat, geraniums on the window-ledge, a tolerant sun! I was all a mistake! There was a black fish swimming among all those white fish and that black fish was chosen to be me. I was sister to none of them, I was ill chance itself, I was a shark, an infant black shark. Why did you not recognize it and cut its throat? What kind of merciful father were you who never cared for me but sent me out into the world a monster? Crush me, devour me, annihilate me before it is too late! Wipe me clean, wipe out too, these whispering watchers and this house in the middle of nowhere, and let me try again in a civilized setting! Wake up and embrace me! Show me your heart just once and I swear I will never look again, into your heart or any other, be it the heart of the meanest stone! I will give up this kind of talk too, every word of it! When the words come I will set fire to them! Do you not see that it is only despair, love and despair, that makes me talk this way? Speak to me! Do I have to call on you in words of blood to make you speak? What horrors more do you demand of me? Must I carve out my beseechings with a knife on your flesh? Do you think you can die before you have said Yes to me? Do you think I cannot breathe the breath of your lungs for you or pump your heart in my fist? Do you think I will lay pennies on your eyes before you have looked at me or tie up your jaw before you have spoken? You and I will live together in this room till I have my way, till the crack of doom, till the stars fall out of the sky. I am I! I can wait!

            137. There is no change in his condition.

            I am losing patience with everything, I have no stomach for trotting from room to room performing realistic tasks, conducting stupid conversation with Hendrik. Nothing happens or can be made to happen. We are in the doldrums. I twiddle my thumbs and fret. If only it would rain! If only lightning would strike and set the veld on fire! If only the last of the great reptiles would rise out of the slime at the bottom of the dawn! If only naked men on ponies would come pouring out of the hills and massacre us! What must I do to save myself from the tedium of existence on this of all days? Why does Hendrik not plunge a breadknife into the breast of the man who wasted the joy of his life? Why does Klein-Anna not come out of her bolting-hole, wherever that is, and kneel before her husband and beg forgiveness, and be cuffed and spat on and reconciled? Why is she not weeping at her paramour's bedside? Why is Hendrik so withdrawn? Why, instead of waiting tirelessly in the kitchen, is he not hovering about me, smiling secret smiles and hinting at the price of silence? Why does my father not rouse himself and curse us? Why is it left to me to give life not only to myself, minute after surly minute, but to everyone else on the farm, and the farm itself, every stick and stone of it? I said once that I slept, but that was a lie. I said that every night I donned my white nightdress and fell asleep with my horny toes pointing to the stars. But that cannot be true. How can I afford to sleep? If for one moment I were to lose my grip on the world, it would fall apart: Hendrik and his shy bride would dissolve to dust in each other's arms and sift to the floor, the crickets would stop chirping, the house would deliquesce to a pale abstract of lines and angles against a pale sky, my father would float like a black cloud and be sucked into the lair inside my head to beat the wails and roar like a bear. All that would remain would be me, lying for that fatal instant in a posture of sleep on an immaterial bed above an immaterial earth before everything vanished. I make it all up in order that it shall make me up. I cannot stop now.

            138. But I have dreams. I do not sleep but I have dreams: how I manage that I do not know. One of my dreams is about a bush. When the sun has set and the moon is dark and the stars shed so little light that one cannot see a hand in front of one's face, the bush I dream of glows with an unearthly light. I stand before the bush watching it, and the bush watches me back through the depths of profoundest night. Then I grow sleepy. I yawn and lie down and sleep, in my sleep, and the last star goes out in the sky above me. But the bush, alone in the universe, but for me who am now asleep and therefore who knows where, continues to shed on me its radiance.

            Such is my dream about the burning bush. There is a scheme of interpretation, I am sure, according to which my dream about the bush is a dream about my father. But who is to say what a dream about my father is?

            139. "Must I harness the donkeys, miss?"

            "No, let us wait, it will only make the pain worse if we move the baas now."

            140. The girl is in the sewing-room.. She must have hidden here all night, crouching in a corner, listening to the groans from the bedroom and the footfalls on the gravel outside until she fell asleep on the floor in a nest of drapery like a cat. Having decided to find her, I have found her at once: one does not grow up in a house without learning the nuances of its breathing.

            "Well, now the fun and games are over! And where are your clothes? Leave my blankets alone, please, you have clothes of your own. Well, come on, what are you going to do now? What are you going to say to your husband? What are you going to say to him about last night? Come on, speak up, what are you going to tell your husband? What have you been up to here in the house? You slut! You filth! Look what a mess you've caused! It's your fault, all this mess is your fault! But one thing I tell you, you get out today, you and Hendrik, I am finished with you! And stop crying, it's too late to cry, you should rather have cried yesterday, it won't help today! Where are your clothes? Put your clothes on, don't stand naked in front of me, put your clothes on and get out, I don't want to see you again! I'm going to tell Hendrik to come and fetch you."

            "Please, miss, my clothes are gone."

            "Don't lie to me, your clothes are in the bedroom where you were!"

            "Yes, miss, Please, miss, he will hit me." Thus, venting torrents of mean-spirited resentment on the girl, swelling with ire and self-righteousness, do I become for a blessed interval a woman among women, shrew among doughty country shrews. It comes of itself, one needs no lessons, only meek folk around one and a grudge against them for not speaking back. I am cantankerous, but only because there is infinite space around me, and time before and after from which history seems to have retreated, and evidence in these bowed faces of limitless power. Everywhere I beat my fists on air. What is there for me but dreary expansion to the limits of the universe? Is it any wonder that nothing is safe from me, that the lowliest veld-flower is likely to find itself raped in its being or that I should dream with yearning of a bush that resists my metaphysical conquest? Poor Hendrik, poor Anna, what chance have they?

            141. "Hendrik! Listen carefully: Anna is in the house. She is sorry about everything that has happened. She says it won't happen again. She wants to ask your forgiveness. What I want to know is: must I send her out, or is there going to be trouble? Because, Hendrik, I am telling you here and now, if you give trouble I wash my hands of both of you, you can get out today. I want to make myself quite clear. What happens between you and Anna is none of my business; but if she comes to me and says you have been cruel to her, beware! "

            "Anna! Come here at once! Come on, hurry up, he won't do anything!"

            The child shuffles out. She is wearing her own clothes again, the brown frock to her knees, the blue cardigan, the scarlet kerchief. She stands in front of Hendrik tracing patterns, with her big toe in the gravel. Her face is blotched with tear-stains. She sniffs and sniffs.

            Hendrik speaks.

            "Miss must not get upset, but miss is interfering too much."

            He moves a step closer to Klein-Anna. His voice is big with passion as I have never heard it before. Anna slides behind me, wiping her nose on her sleeve. It is a beautiful morning and I am caught in a dogfight. "You! I'll kill you!" says Hendrik. Anna grips my dress between my shoulderblades. I shake myself loose. Hendrik swears at her in words whose meaning I can mostly only guess at, I have not heard them before, how surprising. "Stop it!" I scream. Ignoring me he lunges at Anna. At once she spins on her heel and starts running and he after her. She is nimble and barefoot, he shod but driven by fury. Shrieking without letup she spins leftward and rightward trying to throw him off. Then in the middle of the schoolhouse road a hundred yards from where I stand, she suddenly falls and curls into a cringing ball. Hendrik begins to punch and kick; she screams despairingly. I pick up my skirts and run towards them. This is certainly action, and unambiguous action, too. I cannot deny that there is exhilaration mixed in with my alarm.

            142. Hendrik is kicking rhythmically at her with his soft shoes. He does not look up at me, his face is wet with sweat, he has work to do. If there were a stick to hand he would be using it, but there are not many sticks in this part of the world, his wife is fortunate.

            I tug at his waistcoat. "Leave her!" I say. It is as if he expected me, for he takes hold of my wrist, then, turning smoothly, of the other wrist too. For a second he stands face to face with me clenching my wrists against his chest. I smell his heat, not without distaste. "Stop it!" I say. "Let me go!"

            A number of movements follow, which, in the flurry of the moment, I cannot discriminate, though I shall be able to do so later In the cool of retrospection, I am sure. I am shaken back and forth: my feet stagger one way and another out of time with my body, my head jerks, I am off balance yet not allowed to fall. I know I look ridiculous. Happily, living here in the heart of nowhere, one need not keep up a front for anyone, not even, it would now appear, for the servants. I am not angry, though my teeth rattle: there are worse things than standing up for the weak, there are worse things than being shaken, not unkindly, I can feel no malevolence in this man whose passion is forgivable and whose eyes are anyhow, I see, closed.

            I stumble backward, let go by Hendrik, who turns away from me to the girl, who is gone. I fall heavily on my backside, my palms are scorched by the gravel, my skirts fly in the air. I am dizzy but gay and ready for more, perhaps what has been wrong all these years is simply that I have had no one to play with. The blood thuds in my ears. I close my eyes: in a moment I will be myself.

            143. Hendrik is out of sight. I beat my clothes and the dust rises in clouds. The pocket of my skirt is ripped clear off and the keyring with the keys to the storehouse, the pantry, and the dining-room cabinets, is gone. I scratch around until I find it, pat my hair straight, and set off up the schoolhouse road after Hendrik. Event has been following event, yet the exhilaration is fading, I am losing momentum, I am not sure why I follow them further, perhaps they ought to be left to settle their debts and make peace in their own way. But I do not want to be alone, I do not want to begin moping.

            144. Hendrik crouches on hands and knees over the girl on the truckle bed as if about to sink his teeth into her throat.

            She lifts her knees to push him off; her dress falls back over her hips. "No," she pleads with him, and I hear it all, stopping suddenly in the schoolhouse doorway, catching first the highlights on her thighs and his cheekbones, then, as my eyes adjust to the gloom inside, everything else--"No, not here, she'll catch us!"

            The two heads turn in unison to the shape in the doorway. "God!" she says. She drops her legs, clutches her skirt down, and turns her face to the wall. Hendrik comes upright on his knees. He grins straight at me. From his middle juts out unhidden what must be his organ, but grotesquely larger than it should be, unless I am mistaken. He says: "Miss has surely come to watch."

            145. I open the sickroom door and am hit by the sweet stench. The room is peaceful and sunny but filled with a high complex drone. There are hundreds of flies here, common houseflies and the larger green-tailed blowflies whose curt rasp is submerged in the general hum so that the texture of sound in the room is replete and polyphonal.

            My father's eye is upon me. His lips form a word which I cannot hear. I stand in the doorway unwilling. I should not have come back. Behind every door there is a new horror.

            The word comes again. I tiptoe to the bedside. The pitch of the buzzing rises as the flies make way before me. One fly continues to sit on the bridge of his nose and clean its face. I brush it away. It rises, circles, and, settles on my forearm. I brush it away. I could spend all day like this. The hum grows steady again.

            Water is the word he is saying. I nod.

            I raise the bedclothes and look. He is lying in a sea of blood and shit that has already begun to cake. I tuck the bedclothes back under his armpits.

            "Yes, daddy," I say.

            146. I hold the beaker to his lips and he sucks noisily.

            "More," he whispers.

            "First wait a little," I tell him.

            "More."

            He drinks more water and grips my arm, waiting for something, listening for something far away. I wave the flies off. He begins to croon, more and more loudly, his whole body stiffening. I should be doing something for his pain. The pressure on my arm is forcing me down. I yield, crouching at the bedside, not wishing to sit on the ooze in the bed. The stench grows sickening.

            "Poor daddy, " I whisper, and put a hand on his forehead. He is hot.

            Under the bedclothes there is a liquid convulsion... He releases his breath with a gasp. I cannot stand this. One by one I pick the fingers from my arm, but one by one they close again. He is by no means without strength. I wrench my arm loose and stand up. His eyes open. "The doctor will soon be here," I tell him. The mattress is irrecoverable, it will have to be burned. I must close the window. I must also put back the curtains, the afternoon heat and the stench together will be too much for anyone. I will not stand for any more flies.

            147. The flies, which ought to be in transports of joy, sound merely cross. Nothing seems to be good enough for them. For miles around they have forsaken the meagre droppings of the herbivores and flown like arrows to this gory festival. Why are they not singing? But perhaps what I take for petulance is the sound of insect ecstasy. Perhaps their lives from, cradle to grave, so to speak, are one long ecstasy, which I mistake. Perhaps the lives of animals too are one long ecstasy interrupted only at the moment when they know with full knowledge that the knife has found their secret and they will never again see the goodly sun which even at this instant goes black before them. Perhaps the lives of Hendrik and Klein-Anna are ecstasy, if not acute ecstasy then at least, a kind of gentle streaming of radiance from eyes and fingertips which I do not see, interrupted only on such occasions as last night and this morning. Perhaps ecstasy is not after all so rare. Perhaps if I talked less and gave myself more to sensation I would know more of ecstasy. Perhaps, on the other hand, if I stopped talking I would fall into panic, losing my hold on the world I know best. It strikes me that I am faced with a choice that flies do not have to make.

            148. One after another the flies fall under my swatter, some erupting in gouts of crop-slime, some folding their legs and passing neatly away, some spinning about angrily on their backs, until the coup de gràce descends. The survivors circle the room, waiting for me to tire. But I must keep a clean house and to that end I am tireless; If I abandon this room, locking the door, stuffing the cracks with rags, I will in time find myself abandoning another room, and, then others, until the house is all but lost, its builders all but betrayed, the roof sagging, the shutters clapping, the woodwork cracking, the fabrics rotting, the mice having a field day, only a last room, intact, a single room and a dark passage where I wander night and day tapping at the walk, trying for old times sake to remember the various rooms, the guest-room, the dining-room, the pantry in which the various jams wait patiently, sealed under candlewax, for a day of resurrection that will never come; and then retire, dizzy with sleepiness, for even mad old women, insensible to heat and cold, taking their nourishment from the passing air, from motes of dust and drifting strands of spiderweb and fleas eggs, must sleep, to the last room, my own room, with the bed against the wall and the mirror and the table in the corner where, chin in hand, I think my mad old woman's thoughts and where I shall die, seated, and rot, and where the flies will suck at me, day after day after day, to say nothing of the mice and the ants, until I am a clean white skeleton, with nothing more to give the world and can be left in peace, with, the spiders in my eyesockets spinning traps for the stragglers to the feast.

            149. A day must have intervened here. Where there is a blank there must have been a day during which my father sickened irrecoverably, and during which Hendrik and Klein-Anna made their peace, for thenceforth they were as before, or if not as before then changed toward the wiser and sadder in ways I could not discern. It must have been a day which I passed somehow. Perhaps I spent it asleep. Perhaps, having killed all the flies, I fetched a wet sponge and cooled my father's brow until I could no longer tolerate the stench. Perhaps I went and stood in the passage waiting for his call, and there fell asleep and dreamed of rain and the veld covered, in flowers, white and violet and orange, rippling in the wind, till at nightfall, I awoke and arose to feed the chickens. Perhaps then, in the gloom, with the feed-bowl under my arm, I stood listening to the night breeze rustle the leaves, and watched the bats flicker against the last light, and felt the sweeping melancholy of those who pass their days in the midst of insupportable beauty in the knowledge that one day they will die. Perhaps I prayed then, not for the first time, that I would die tranquil and not begrudge myself to the earth, but look forward to life as a flower or as the merest speck in the gut of a worm, unknowing. I think it is possible that such a day did intervene, and that I did spend it like that, helpless in the face of my father's pain, wishing it away, dozing, wandering about in the yard in the cool of the evening thinking how it would be when we were all gone. There are, however, other ways in which I could have spent the day and which I cannot ignore. I could have been the one who tried to help him out of bed and failed, he being heavy, I being slight. This would explain how he came to die so hideously draped over the edge of the bed, his face purple, his eyes bulging, his tongue hanging out. Perhaps I wanted to move him out of the morass he lay in. Perhaps I wanted to take him to another room. Perhaps, dismayed and sickened, I abandoned him. Perhaps I cradled his head in my arms and sobbed, saying, "Daddy, please help me, I can't do it by myself." Perhaps when it grew clear that he could not help, that he had no strength, that he was preoccupied above all else with what was happening inside him, perhaps then I said, "Daddy, forgive me, I didn't mean it, I loved you, that was why I did it."

            150. But to tell the truth, I am wary of all these suppositions. I suspect that the day the day was missing I was not there; and if that is so I shall never know how the day was filled. For I seem to exist more and more intermittently.

            Whole hours, whole afternoons go missing. I seem to have grown impatient with the sluggish flow of time. Once I would have been content to fill my days with musings; but now, having been through a carnival of incident, I am quite seduced. Like the daughters in the boarding-houses I sit tapping my fingernails on the furniture, listening to the tick of the clock, waiting for the next thing to happen. Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me. Country ways! How I long for country ways.

            151. I sit at the kitchen table waiting for my coffee to cool. Hendrik and Klein-Anna stand over me. They say that they are waiting to hear what to do, but I cannot help them.

            There is nothing to do in the kitchen since no one eats meals any more. What there is to be done on the farm Hendrik knows better than I. He must preserve the sheep from jackals and wildcats. He must annihilate the ticks and the blowfly grubs. He must help the ewes to lamb. He must make the garden grow and save it from the army worm. Therefore it is not true that Hendrik and Klein-Anna are here waiting for orders: they are waiting to see what I will do next.

            152. I sit at the kitchen table waiting for my coffee to cool. Over me stand Hendrik and Klein-Anna.

            "The smell is getting bad, " says Hendrik.