Karel Schoeman: This Life

I must get up and journey back into the past, through the dark, alone across the years. I must move through the darkness of the sleeping house, soundlessly so no one will hear me, and pull open the front door; I must cross the threshhold and venture outside.

The moon has not yet risen, but in the faded, diffused glow of the stars I can recognise the world of my youth, the wide landscape of my life, the bleak, faded land of shrub and stone, the harsh land of frost, snow and drought. Bitter land where I was born, meagre shaly soil where they will dig my grave inside the stone walls of the graveyard. I should like to move out through the sleeping house once more, to take leave of my life; I should like to go out one last time and behold the land, in sunlight and starlight, and follow the narrow path to the graveyard beyond the ridge, my hand groping among the stacked stones of the encircling wall. Never again. Only in my memories, sleepless in the dark, shall I still tread the old paths; only in my thoughts shall I still move soundlessly through the familiar darkness of the house, back across all the years.

Get up and go, get up and walk through that darkness; pull open the door and leave the sleeping house, cross the threshhold to the yard where the land stretches out in starlight. Again and again I follow that familiar path, unnoticed in the dark, again and again I waver at that door, waver on the threshhold, only then reaching for the bolt and pulling open the door, only then venturing out into the night.

Meagre land, bitter land, beloved land. How did I come to spend my entire life here yet never really notice you, or notice you so rarely, even then sparing you barely a glance, that even now I remain unfulfilled, always yearning to see you again? Meagre land, sparse land, harsh land of shrub and stone, dry springs and fountains of brackish water; our fountains were the only ones never to run dry and our dams the only ones to glitter in the light. Land without mercy where the wild cat savages the sheep and the eagle swoops down on the lamb, where the herdsman is found dead in his shelter, covered with the fine, sifting snow, and the hunter loses his footing on the rock; unforgiving land, where brother is set against brother and servant against master, where the trespass remains unforgiven and the written word perpetuates the lie, the chiselled inscription is rendered untrue.

I must carry on, barefoot in the half-light of the night, step by step, on the trail of every memory; every remembered word I must examine, and every half-forgotten one attempt to recall; along the rocky ridges, in the dry crevices and hollows of this arid land, borne from one disclosure to the next. I must search for the rare fountain, the dripping of water and the moisture of soil that may have retained a footprint.

Bright land, gleaming silver-grey land drifting away from me in the night, where I marvel at the way every branch of the harpuisbos sparkles as its dense, whorled leaves reflect the glimmer of the light, and every rock glows dimly on the ridges. The porcupine disappears into the shadows between the shrubs, the yellow cobra slithers past my feet, and jackal trot along the rocky ridges, paying no heed to the grazing sheep. I have nothing more to fear, walking barefoot and alone through the veld and over the stones in my flapping nightgown until I reach the edge of the escarpment where the vertical rockface falls away, the sheer drop invisible in the depth of the shadows as if it were not there, barefoot on the rocky ledge at the edge of the world, the rock cold under my feet and the piercing wind blowing straight at me, yet I do not freeze or falter. Beneath me lie the mountain ranges, cliffs, chasms and plains of the Karoo, one mountain range after another ranked to the horizon; beneath me lie the warm lowlands filled with the herbal scent of shrubs, and one last time I survey it all; but then I turn back to the low inclines of the plateau where the wind blows so piercingly, back to the land where I was born, the bitter land, the beloved land, and slowly in the starlight, over shrubs and coarse clumps of grass, past the ridges where the jackal hides, through the dry streams with their stony beds and fissures where water has not flowed for many years, I walk back. At last I see in the distance once again the glitter of the dams and the dark shape of the house with its high thatched roof set against the ridge, the kraal and the shed and the outbuildings in the background, the radiant pear trees covered with blossoms in spring; and past the orchard the footpath leading to the graveyard with its few stone mounds and headstones in the shelter of the encircling wall of stacked stones.

The farm was granted to Father’s grandfather when the first white people toiled up the passes of the Roggeveld Mountains to find grazing for their sheep flocks here along the edge of the escarpment. It must have been he or his son who had built the old stone house with its walls of stacked flat stones and its big hearth that still formed part of the outbuildings during my childhood; the thatched roof had already begun to collapse over the rafters when I got to know it, and later Maans had it demolished when the outbuildings were resited. It was not a very big farm, but it was favourably situated here on the edge of the escarpment and it was one of the best sheep farms in the district, with good grazing and dams fed by springs that ran dry only during the harshest droughts.

Of my great-grandfather and his wife I know nothing more, and not much more about my grandparents either, because they all died before I was born, and Father was a rather reserved man who was never very keen to speak of the past. Mother never spoke of the past, nor did she, even in passing, refer to anything that had happened earlier. I only know that as children we sometimes picked up arrowheads in the veld and I recall Father mentioning how, when he was a boy, they had to flee to the Karoo because they were attacked by Bushmen; men making a furrow or digging in a field would come upon beads of polished ostrich eggshells or a bracelet, and sometimes upon a grave with skulls and bones. Once Father also told of the butchers’ men that were sent from the Cape in earlier days to buy sheep, and that is probably how Oupa made his money, for apparently he was a wealthy man for these parts at the time of his death. He had married a woman from the Bokkeveld, and it was he who had built the large homestead; but no, I remember Father telling us that she herself had overseen the builders while they were working, for Oupa was probably a gentle and meek man, much like Father, and so she had taken the lead. The old people moved across to the new homestead, and when Father and Mother were married, they lived in the old house — both Jakob and Pieter were born there. Only after Oupa’s death did Father and Mother come to live in the new house, and that is where I was born then, in the house where I shall also die. Father added two more rooms, and after that no further changes were made to the house.

It was not a particularly large house, neither could it be called grand — Stienie always found it dark, poky and old-fashioned, and she did not rest until she had built her own home — but it was situated in a poor and remote region where most farmers had to move about constantly to find water and grazing, across the Riet River to the Nuweveld or down to the Karoo in winter, and among the simpler makeshift homes of the Roggeveld it appeared solid and impressive, and even grand through my childish eyes. Thick walls, almost two feet wide, a brandsolder resting on beams, under a high, thatched roof, small windows with wooden shutters on the inside, and clay floors — I was a young girl when it was decided to fit glass panes; no, it was just before Maans married Stienie, and I was a grown woman by then. Nevertheless, the house was never good enough for Stienie, though she kept her complaints to herself while Mother was still alive, and I suppose it must have been cold and dark and inconvenient, but we lived like that all the years without knowing any better, Father who died there, and Mother, we children who grew up there, Sofie during her brief stay with us and Maans who was born there — yes, and Stienie too for all those years until Maans had the new stone house built for her on the plain towards the road. After that they did not make much effort to keep up the old homestead, because only Pieter lived there, and during these past years Annie and her daughter, and what did they actually mean to Maans that he should put himself out for them? The house began to fall into disrepair, but essentially it is still as I knew it in my childhood, sixty and seventy years ago, with the long, dark voorhuis where you enter, and two small rooms on either side: Father and Mother slept in the front room on the right, the one on the left later became Jakob and Sofie’s room, and behind Father and Mother’s room was mine, with the window overlooking the yard and the outbuildings, until the shutters were closed and latched against the moonlight. It is to this room that they carried me, this room to which I was carried back, to lie awake in the dark, awaiting my death.