Three Stories (2 page)

So here he is, in midsummer, in Catalonia. In the cool of the morning he climbs
on to the roof. On hands and knees, with a trowel, he begins to scratch away the
moss that has grown between the tiles. From her balcony two doors down the street
an old woman in black watches him. He hopes she approves.
A foreigner but a serious
man
: that is what he hopes she thinks.

He grows geraniums, pink and red, in terracotta pots, and places them on either side
of the front door, as the neighbours do.
Little attentions
, he calls them. Little
attentions
to the house, like the attentions one pays a woman.

If this is marriage, he tells himself, then it is a widow I am marrying, a mature
woman, set in her ways. Just as I cannot be a different man, so I should not want
her to become, for my sake, a different woman, younger, flashier, sexier.

By his labours he is, to some extent, breaking his unwritten compact with the village.
When an outsider moves in and buys property, the compact says, he should bring profit
to the local people: buy from the local merchants, give work to the local artisans.
The work he is doing on the house belongs by right to those artisans. But on this
point he will not yield. What he is engaged in is more serious than mere upkeep.
It is intimate work, work he must do with his own hands. In time, he hopes, the local
people will come to understand.

The village, of course, has memories of the house from before his time, and before
the time of Sr Torras the jack-of-all-trades from Sant Climens. The villagers know—or
if they do not know, then their parents and aunts and uncles knew—the family that
used to live here, the family whose children grew up hating the dark, cramped rooms,
the damp walls, the old-fashioned plumbing, and as soon as their parents died washed
their hands of the place, selling it for a song to Sr Torras, who fixed it up and
resold it to a foreigner because foreigners (inexplicably) prefer old houses and
are prepared to pay more than they are worth to own them.

When one marries, one cares deeply who one's wife was married to before, even who
she slept with before. With a house, one is not supposed to care who preceded one.
That is another of the ways in which the analogy
between ownership and marriage,
houses and wives, is supposed to break down. But not in this case. Between these
walls men and women, generation after generation, lived their intimate lives, talking
and quarrelling and making love in a language he barely understands, according to
habits that are foreign to him. They have left no ghosts behind, none that he can
sense. But that does not matter. He broods on them, insofar as one can brood on people
one has never so much as glimpsed. If he had photographs of them he would hang them
on the walls: dour couples in their dark Sunday best, with their children crouching
at their feet, humble as rabbits.

Why? Why does he want to remember people he never knew? For a good reason. When his
own time here has passed, he does not want to be utterly forgotten. If the village
will not remember him (he will die far away;
after a decent interval there will appear,
without explanation, a new owner, a new face, and that will be that), then he hopes
(hoping against hope) that in some sense the house itself will bear the memory of
him.

What it comes down to, astonishingly, is that he wants a relationship with this house
in a foreign country, a human relationship, however absurd the idea of a human relationship
with stone and mortar might be. For the sake of that relationship, with this house
and its history and the village as a whole, a village that, from the highway, looks
as though it had been conceived by a single mind and built by a single pair of hands—in return for that relationship he is prepared to treat the house as one treats
a woman, paying attention to her needs and even her quirks, spending money on her,
soothing her through her bad times, treating her with kindness.

Kindness. Fidelity. Devotion. Service. Not love, not yet, but something like it.
A form of marriage between a man growing old and a house no longer young.

II
NIETVERLOREN

FOR
AS
LONG
AS
HE
could remember, from when he was first allowed to roam by himself
out
in the veld, out of sight of the farmhouse, he was puzzled by it: a circle of
bare,
flat earth ten paces across, its periphery marked with stones, a circle in
which
nothing grew, not a blade of grass.

He thought of it as a fairy circle, a circle
where fairies came at night to dance
by the light of the tiny sparkling rods that they carried in the picturebooks he
read, or perhaps by the light of glowworms. But in the picturebooks the fairy circle
was always in a clearing in a forest, or else in a glen, whatever that might be.
There were no forests in the Karoo, no glens, no glowworms; were there even fairies?
What would fairies do with themselves in the daytime, in the stunned heat of summer,
when it was too hot to dance, when even the lizards took shelter under stones? Would
the fairies have enough sense to hide under stones too, or would they lie panting
among the thornbushes, longing for England?

He asked his mother about the circle. Is it a fairy circle, he demanded? It can only
be a fairy circle, she replied. He was not convinced.

They were visitors on the farm, though not particularly welcome visitors. They visited
because they were family, and family were always entitled to visit. This particular
visit had stretched on month after month: his father was away in the war, fighting
the Italians, and they had nowhere else to go. He could have asked his grandmother
what the circle was, but his grandmother never went into the veld, saw no sense in
walking for the sake of walking. She would never have laid eyes on the circle, it
was not the kind of thing that interested her.

The war ended; his father returned with a stiff little military moustache and a dapper,
upright stride. They were back on the farm; he was walking with him in the veld.
When they came to the circle, which he no longer called a fairy circle since he no
longer believed in fairies, his father casually remarked, “Do you see that? That's
the old threshing floor. That's where they used to thresh, in the old days.”

Thresh
: not a word he knew, but whatever
it meant, he did not like it. Too much like
thrash
.
Get a thrashing
: that was what happened to boys when they were naughty.
Naughty
was another word he drew back from. He did not want to be around when words like
that were spoken.

Threshing turned out to be something one did with flails. There was a picture of
it in the encyclopedia: men in funny old-fashioned clothes beating the ground with
sticks with what look like bladders tied to them.

“But what are they
doing
?” he asked his mother.

“They are flailing the wheat,” she replied.”

“What is flailing?”

“Flailing is threshing. Flailing is beating.”

“But
why
?”

“To separate the kernels of wheat from the chaff,” she explained.

Flailing the wheat: it was all beyond him. Was he being asked to believe that once
upon
a time men used to beat wheat with bladders out in the veld? What wheat? Where
did they get wheat to beat?

He asked his father. His father was vague. The threshing happened when he was small,
he said; he was not paying attention. He was small, then he went away to boarding
school; when he came back they were no longer threshing, perhaps because the drought
killed the wheat, the drought of 1929 and 1930 and 1931, on and on, year after year.

That was the best his father could offer: not a fairy circle but a threshing floor,
until the great drought came; then just a patch of earth where nothing grew. There
the story rested for thirty years. After thirty years, back on the farm on what turned
out to be his final visit, the story came up again, or if not the story in
full then
enough of it for him to be able to fill in the gaps. He was paging through photographs
from the old days when he came upon a photograph of two young men with rifles, off
on a hunt. In the background, not supposed to be part of the photograph, were two
donkeys yoked together, and a man in tattered clothes, also not supposed to be in
the picture, one hand on the yoke, squinting toward the camera from under his hat.

He peered more closely. Surely he recognised the site! Surely that was the threshing
floor! The donkeys and their leader, captured in mid-stride sometime in the 1920s,
were on the threshing floor, treading the wheat with their hooves, separating the
grains from the chaff. If the photograph could come to life, if the two grinning
young men were to pick up their rifles and disappear over the rim of the picture,
he would at last have it before him,
the whole mysterious business of threshing.
The man with the hat, and the two donkeys, would resume their tread round and round
the threshing floor, a tread that would, over the years, compact the earth so tightly
that nothing would ever grow there. They would trample the wheat, and the wind—the
wind that always blows in the Karoo, from horizon to horizon—would lift the chaff
and whirl it away; the grain that was left behind would be gathered up and picked
clean of straw and pebbles and ground small, ground to the finest flour, so that
bread could be baked in the huge old wood-burning oven that used to dominate the
farm kitchen.

But where did the wheat come from that the donkeys so patiently trod, donkeys dead
now these many years, their bones cast out and picked clean by ants?

The wheat, it turned out (this was the
outcome of a long investigation, and even
then he could not be sure if what he heard was true), was grown right here, on the
farm, on what in the old days must have been cultivated land but has now reverted
to bare veld. An acre of land had been given over to the growing of wheat, just as
there had been an acre given over to pumpkin and squash and watermelon and sweetcorn
and beans. Every day, from a dam that was just a pile of stones now, farmhands used
to irrigate the acres; when the kernels turned brown, they reaped the wheat by hand,
with sickles, bound it in sheaves, carted it to the threshing-floor, threshed it,
then ground it to flour (he searched everywhere for the grinding stones, without
success). From the bounty of those two acres the table was stocked not only of his
grandfather but of all the families who worked for him. There were even cows kept,
for milk, and pigs to eat the scraps.

So all those years ago this had been a self-sufficient farm, growing all its needs;
and all the other farms in the neighbourhood, this vast, sparsely peopled neighbourhood,
were self-sufficient too, more or less—farms where nothing grows any more, where
no ploughing or sowing or tilling or reaping or threshing takes place, farms which
have turned into vast grazing grounds for sheep, where farmers sit huddled over computers
in darkened rooms calculating their profit and loss on sheepswool and lambsflesh.

Hunting and gathering, then pastoralism, then agriculture: those, he had been taught
as a child, were the three stages in the ascent of man from savagery, an ascent whose
end was not yet in sight. Who would have believed that there were places in the world
where in the space of a century or two man would graduate
from stage one to stage
two to stage three and then regress to stage two. This Karoo, looked upon today as
a desert on which flocks of ungulates barely clung to life, was not too long ago
a region where hopeful farmers planted in the thin, rocky soil seeds brought from
Europe and the New World, pumped water out of the artesian basin to keep them alive,
subsisted on their fruits: a region of small, scattered peasant farmers and their
labourers, independent, almost outside the money economy.

What put an end to it? No doubt the Great Drought disheartened many and drove them
off the land. And no doubt, as the artesian basin was depleted over the years, they
had to drill deeper and deeper for water. And of course who would want to break his
back growing wheat and milling flour and baking bread when you had only to get in
a car and drive for an hour to find a shop with
racks and racks of ready-baked bread,
to say nothing of pasteurised milk and frozen meat and vegetables?

Still, there was a larger picture. What did it mean for the land as a whole, and
the conception the land had of itself, that huge tracts of it should be sliding back
into prehistory? In the larger picture, was it really better that families who in
the old days lived on the land by the sweat of their brow should now be mouldering
in the windswept townships of Cape Town? Could one not imagine a different history
and a different social order in which the Karoo was reclaimed, its scattered sons
and daughters reassembled, the earth tilled again?

Bill and Jane, old friends from the United States, have arrived on a visit. Starting
in the
north of the country, they have driven in a hired car down the east coast; now the
plan is that all four of them will drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The route,
which runs for hundreds of miles through the Karoo, is not one that he likes. For
reasons of his own he finds it depressing. But these are special friends, this is
what they want to do, he does not demur.

“Didn't you say your grandfather had a farm in the Karoo?” says Bill. “Do we pass
anywhere near there?”

“It's not in the family anymore,” he replies. It is a lie. The farm is in the hands
of his cousin Constant. Furthermore it does not take much of a detour off the Cape
Town–Johannesburg road to get there. But he does not want to see the farm again,
and what it has become, not in this life.