her palm and put it into my mouth and chew it fine and swallow. She remains sitting. I find my place in the verse:
There was Abraham buried and Sarah, his wife. Here endeth the Lesson tonight.
Maria gets up, takes the porcelain dish from Nombini’s hand again, this time more politely, and puts it on the pile of plates.
Is the whore going to help me wash up, or am I Hotnot to both of you now?
Maria, don’t be jealous. You’re my wife.
I wish I was, Buys.
You are, that I promise, my beloved dear Sarah. Weren’t you listening to what I was reading?
She walks away, sighs, then turns around:
Jealous, Buys. I wish I was jealous.
The lightning flashes and outside the whole world scintillates. In the bright glare of the lightning nothing remains hidden and we lot at the table see each other as we are and the surface of everyone’s countenance is illuminated for an instant and reveals no depth and is wholly unknowable and then it is dark again and the shadows drape soft comforting masks over our faces.
On this night the house is steamed up with the breaths of human and animal. It is as if the air itself turns to smooth and damp walls. The rain has stopped but the dripping carries on. The house is full, even the pig has to sleep outside and the pig never sleeps outside. The house feels empty. The house feels big and endlessly known, endlessly repetitive. As if there are passages and halls into all eternity, as if every drop dripping into the bowl has to resound. But nothing sounds in this house.
I lie next to Nombini in the front room and listen to the faraway thunder and Maria’s snoring even further away.
The next morning the clouds have gone and the air is translucent. I yell at the Hottentots. The jackals have been at the sheep. I take Nombini to the labourers’ huts and tell them they have to build her a hut as the Caffres build their huts and she’ll stay among them and they will listen to her because she is my wife. The Hottentots talk among one another and look at the young woman who remains standing there when I walk back to my house. The young girl who doesn’t look back – as I look back – to see where her man is going. She remains standing, alone and with two children on her arms, and looks at them.
At dusk two days later I ride to her. I twist Glider’s reins around a branch and sling the roll of hides over my right shoulder and the two guns over my left and I don’t stoop low enough to enter the hut. I curse and she laughs from her beautiful belly. That evening she and I sit by a fire in front of the hut and the labourers coming from the fields greet us cordially and walk on. Towards the end of the week I saddle my horse and go hunting elephants and don’t find a single one and come back home.
It is still autumn, but see, I’m hibernating. I sleep till afternoon, then walk up and down in the house wrapped in hides, go and lie down again. If I go far enough, all the way to the end of sleep’s labyrinth, I find silence. The house is bigger than any I’ve ever stayed in before, but the longer this winter sleep lasts, the more the house shrinks around me. As if the reeds on the roof and the clay on the walls are compacted around me like a nest and then, weeks later, as if the walls turn sticky and soft and enfold me like the membrane of a chrysalis.
My people soon learn to leave me alone. For the most part I don’t hear them and if they do make me aware of them, I roar at them before spinning myself into my chrysalis again. I curl myself up in my karosses and bedspread that I’ve thrown down in the corner of the room. Maria sleeps on the bed. She says my groaning keeps her awake. She says I am welcome to go and lie with my Caffre girl. I remain lying in the corner.
I concentrate on keeping as still as possible, every movement is considered before it’s executed. I know the soul of every muscle. Late in the afternoon of a day of which I do not know the name I lie staring at a snail trailing across the floor. I look at the fury with which the snail crawls out of its shell. Just see the horns slowly unfurling.
The children are buzzing around Maria like blowflies and ask after their father.
He’s lying in wait, I hear her say.
For what? they ask.
She sends them out. She is a mother, she knows about withdrawing into shells, the preparation of a passage out. Her mouth twists when the child kicks inside her. Do you think that when she’s standing like that looking at her Coenraad lying on the ground under his hides, do you think she sees me and thinks of snakes in their holes? Or do you think she remembers how her father in their hut at the Senekals paced up and down every night?
In the late afternoons I disappear. Then I go to the sea. On the plain the wind blows without cease. You can’t hear the sea from the house, but it’s not far. I hold the shell and turn it over and touch it, careful not to break it. I lick at it. While I’m looking at it and holding it, the shell’s shape makes absolute sense to me, and as soon as I think of it again under the heap of hides, it becomes wholly incomprehensible.
How could I have known that twilit afternoon that the shellfish excretes its own house? Who could possibly have told me that the building material seeps through the creature, how it distils its miraculous covering according to its need? I press the shell to my eye and see darkness; I press the shell to my ear and hear the sea. I could not then put it into words, can still not do so, but what I saw was something of an eternal shaping and reshaping without cease.
Back at the farm I do put two things into words to two people. The first is Windvogel, to whom I say: Count your blessings, friend. You live alone. The second is Nombini to whom, when I am sure she’s asleep, I whisper: In a shell you don’t need a door or a gate, everybody is too scared to enter.
I owe six years and five months’ worth of quitrent on Brandwacht, one year and eleven months on De Driefonteinen and one year and five months on Boschfontein: a total of two hundred and twenty-four rix-dollars. The Caffres stream over the border and murder Christians. The Christians blame me because I look for trouble with the Caffres and have dealings with their women and then on top of that smuggle them weapons. Why smuggle guns to the Heathens who rob me and whom I rob? To strike up alliances on both sides of the border? Not to chuck all my eggs into one Christian basket? Simply to make the game more interesting? Indeed. Inter alia.
Farmers start abandoning their frontier farms and moving west, back to civilisation. Nobody believes me when I lay charges against the Caffres who steal my cattle, because who would trust such a totally depraved creature? No Christian’s wife opens the door to me, no Christian calls at my farm. My own family no longer knows me. The landdrost and his lackeys don’t bother me with my debts, as long as I stay out of their way and keep my trap shut and eke out my miserable existence on my godforsaken stretch of sand that through all the ages has been washed into the sea by the Sundays River.
The drought returns, and the locusts and the migratory buck devour and trample everything that remains, and the Christians who haven’t yet trekked west now trek west.
On 21 January 1793 the French chop off the head of their king and on 13 July Marat is murdered in his bathtub by a woman with a kitchen knife and later in that year Langa, whose wife is now living with me, takes all my cattle and burns down my farms and my house and everything in it and leaves me adrift in
