Krog

And then the unforgettable phrase: “You never regarded me, Dawid.” The deepest longing of the Afrikaner— to be regarded, by his community, his country, himself. To regard or disregard, probably the origin of endless destructiveness in South Africa.

“For us Afrikaans was a deed of rescue. You wanted to use it as well as you could to rescue yourself and other Afrikaners from poverty and misery. Teachers saw to it that we mastered scientific and classical Afrikaans. We had to learn Afrikaans poems and Bible verses off by heart, and so pure sentence structure and vocabulary were bedded in us. Anglicisms were like cursing. You delighted in storytellers who could play with language. They were heard again and again and their stories retold so often that the unique expressions were extended to everybody.”

In many ways, the trilogy formed a microcosm of the Afrikaner. He began poor and honourable, worked with his hands, had his feet on the ground. His women were attentive and indestructible like brushbush, his children dreamers and schemers. Then the Afrikaner started making money and became ashamed of his working-class background, and from there on, he often found himself in situations he could not cope with socially. He became corrupt and lazy. His women demanding and idle, his children swindlers, his politicians dumb, incompetent brutes.

“Back then, when Van Bruggen wrote his novel Ampie, Oupa refused to have that book in his house as it portrayed the Afrikaner as backwards.”

I dipped my second cookie, astonished as always over what I wouldn’t be able to find on Google but that my mother nevertheless knew.

One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.

You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.

Living with your nose amidst death like that, every “normal” moment in the war is etched in your mind . . . but now, in the post-war life, it seems my life can never retrieve that intensity, as if the normal is now suddenly deathly. Meaningless. I yearn for the war, yes, pining for that vividness! A firmament of sorrow envelopes my thoughts.

It was on patrol. I was on the left flank, & dismounted Voska to inspect some tracks when a Tommy suddenly emerged from behind a taaibos. We were both frozen in shock, each with his loaded rifle in hand. I believe we both thought the same thought: He could be me. That was the first time I shot somebody down from such proximity. Though I recount it now, I possess no visual memory of it. Before, during & after, everything is missing. Only the words with which I am reporting here, remain.

War eludes grasping. It is as if you & the men around you perpetually strive to impose order on the chaos of something untransmittable. Only men like De Wet, you think, comprehend the war to its full extent. We, beset daily by events that defy reality, can later make no sense of anything. We are merely a crumb tumbling in a saddlebag as somebody gallops away.

I see God comes towards me through mud.

God has no ears.

He stares with blunt & lashless eyes.

A victim has no stake in a future (as many Afrikaaners feel now), but a proud loser does. He wants to build. He wants to arrange a dispensation for his people. But when Afrikaners identify as victims, they become useless to society.

After our lunch, when we said goodbye, both of us really wanted to do or say something concluding, bring across a definitive but subtle final message about how we cared for each other, understood each other, but neither of us could. A world of feeling lay like a giant globe between us, but we could not find the solace of an ordinary gesture of reaching out. Then he, in his despair and joy, pressed two five-pound notes into my hand. A beautifully practical deed. That was my father.

Then we could not look at each other a minute longer. He literally ran off. That was good. It was how it should be. If he stayed an extra moment, the meaning of the deed would have changed. It would’ve become my father giving me money, instead of what it essentially was, an immense emotion that bubbled to the surface for a single moment.

30 April 1946

I am 21 years old today. No one is the wiser.

Ma let me know: “Heavens child, a horse is too big to bury, but your father battled for a week to have a large enough hole dug.”

And then: one loves one another and there’s so much joy to be had from the physical manifestations of love. Your father has always been beautiful for me, and even now I can see through the latticework of time how exquisite he was as a young man. I know he has pleasure in seeing me. Despite my worn-down vellies and budding widow’s hump, after all these years he still looks at me expansively. And then there is the legend. It’s the legend holding the lustre through the years of worn reality— if you make sure that nobody steals it from you, as you make sure nobody takes your things or weeds don’t overgrow your garden. If you are watchful and patient, if you have humour but can be steadfast on cardinal matters and let smaller ones fall by the wayside, all this will meaningfully assist you in holding on to love, and nourishing belief in the legend.

Quite comforting, I think, but sometimes you can do as little with good advice as with bad advice.

Just remember. No literary fame is worth it if you betray your country or destroy your people. The more you do it, the less what you have to say will be worth anything. Even when one thinks one’s people are wrong, one stays with them and writes with mercy.

“Night-soil is such a sanitising term, as if done by owls. As if when then day comes, the soil disappears.” My mother was making stew dumplings. Balls of light dough were spooned into boiling water, the pot covered with a lid.

She snapped the book closed, put it on the fridge, screwed the Marmite a bit too aggressively tight and put a doily over the jam. “It is difficult to describe now, but you felt like you were seen as a one-dimensional being, as if you had no roots, no culture that could give you depth or complexity. When you did something unusual, it was simply luck, and you would soon be exposed as the fraud and thief you really were.”

“Was it not perhaps a kind of inferiority on your part that was in fact not the fault of the English?”

My mother sighed. “It probably played a role. But if inferiority is a given and you want a healthy country, then the elimination of that inferiority must be part of everybody’s plan, not the naked intensification thereof.

“You must have no illusions about this: those people are masters at the art of belittling. They loosen in you a weathervane of hate. They decapitate you with one sentence, with a single adjective sink deadly poisonous teeth into you. You fight futilely for your life . . .”

One morning Breyten spoke to us: “You need nobody’s permission to join the struggle. Guilt feelings and self-flagellation are self-indulgent sentiments, but understanding of responsibilities gets you moving. It is in walking that you learn how to walk. Watch out for the exultation of the camel-hair shirt. Clean out the cellars, watch out for the corruption of suffering, of self-pity. Don’t go and sell yourselves as brave warriors. To be against apartheid is not heroic, it’s normal.”

Poets are the last heretics of the world. We flung our country, our trodden, deeply divided land, open like a delightful carpet at our feet. The many colours shot out across the floor and a newborn land slipped from its membrane of languages. And it lay down. Our country lay down among us, translated into parables palpable with light.

We wait and I realise we are waiting for nothing other than the sound. The sound of the shot as the final, complete break-in into the intimacy of a body. That is perhaps what one dies from— not from the bullet, but from shock at the brutal shattering of the body’s privacy by a bullet.

Eleven o’clock. We wait. We know this is nothing— totally nothing compared to what others in this country endure, for decades, centuries.

Endless.

We are on our way to Kroonstad for Christmas and as always are surprised how far one can see across South African landscapes. How stretched out, how hopelessly beautiful the country is. And the deep power with which the land remains itself against all onslaughts. We drive in shifts, and the nearer we get to the Free State, the lighter we become.

“I don’t want to shower. I want to smell the whole day of river mud and my youth with your father.”

Went for a walk this evening— it is bone-white outside with snowflakes falling gently, and everywhere in the houses are Christmas lights. My feet scuff the snow like when you scoop flour with a cup.

Listen. Don’t try building a metaphysical German underground for what was nothing more than schoolgirl mice-nests. Would that I rather did my schoolwork properly! Fortunately, the everyday chaff of inappropriate yearnings cleared up like a fog at university.

Don’t know if I am getting better or dying. The children say that I keep saying the same things over and over. That’s true. But my days are so barren that I sometimes think: How in God’s name can this be regarded as a life? Is there not a way to bypass it? I drill all around me, but my life is as small and bare as a penny.

Yes, but Lordgod, I am alone. And it stabs me in the back daily. Not that there are no people here, it is that what I have become has become uncommunicable. How many times will I still absentmindedly make coffee for two persons? So many years of silence and I am not comprehending that death is forever. My heart shrivelled in my ribs this morning when I heard the front door open and it was not your father’s voice calling.

The farm. Nobody speaks directly to me, but between the lines I hear: it is being appropriated.

But I struggle to tell her how I grew up. She says she can only know me if she can hear how I lived as a child, stories, incidents. Jesus, then my brains freeze. My youth to me is one gigantic noise of fighting, anxiety and shouting, seeing corpses in the street . . . so she wrestles with the gaps in the story of my life, sometimes she jokes about the fridge under my heart . . .

Maa ek sal jou sê: What keeps me with her is she is so fuckin’ dependable. Jirre, I can depend on that woman, verstaan?

This is now what Antjie wants me to say. But Habakkuk, the prophet, says: if the fig tree does not bloom, or the fruits of the olive tree disappoint, it brings inspiration back to one’s own faith. Modern technology makes it so easy to write but so difficult to say something worth saying. Yet, I finally want to make something clear: I heard animals on stoep steps speak to me in tongues. I went into the veld on my horse at a restful pace, never more alone, but also never lonely. To see, to hear, and to recognise— this is the wonder of living. And my children, who like Spartans move among rich and poor, have also not quite turned out as was expected.”

I am stone-ing ahead, my dear Eldest. With well-aimed headshots your father and I learned each other’s weaknesses over many years of marriage and wasted much energy and time trying to improve one another. Only later you learn that your life-partner’s weaknesses could become your best friends. Weaknesses could be the fertiliser in a marriage, but then you should keep yours bottled up, so that you don’t become the source of all the fertiliser.

But she kept on prodding, clearly fishing for an unsavoury story, so I told her straight: “Juffrou, she is a precious child for me. Our politics have nothing to do with each other. If you write something that makes us clash, I will pray you dead!” Afterwards Pa put his hand on my shoulder: Well said! And you know how undemonstrative he was.

With the black government being so corrupt— dear Lord— the amount of shame and embarrassment that it causes black people, almost a second humiliation after apartheid— I never criticise along with white people. Never. Even though I can see they want me to.

The moment truth is brought into language, it becomes fiction in any case.