“I guess my curiosity got the better of me. For a moment I thought it was Dad.”
“Appearances can be deceiving,” Danie smiles at him. “You look again more and more like Oupa.”
Isak sniffs in disagreement, wondering of which one.
“Marrow cabbage.” Danie sniffs as well. “You must be hungry and in need of a drink. The Boeing has come and gone.” He peers out of the door. “Not that we would know.”
The kitchen is tiny. Danie pulls out a stool for both of them and together they perch, their shoulders touching. Isak unzips his jacket.
“Hang it behind the door.”
Gabriel stirs at the stove, casually drinking a beer, while Danie tears at the bread on the table, the white flour sifting over his hands. “Easter loaf, peasant style.” He holds out a chunk of bread. “Our version of the hot cross bun. Help yourself.”
Isak takes a piece. “The wine?”
“The supermarkets are overrun with South African wines, overpriced and a sentimental buy more than anything else.”
Isak sniffs at the bottle’s neck, pulling his face.
“Sweet memories from our childhood.” Danie laughs at Isak’s expression. “Remember the bottles amongst the oleanders?” He fills the glasses. “Gesondheid, glad that you came, after all.”
They sip and Isak pushes his stool slightly back to see his brother’s face from the front. It is a face of people from a time long past.
“Mamma, how is she holding up?” Danie asks lightly.
Isak chews in thought, “Mamma is no longer.”
Quizzically his brother holds his gaze, then drops his head to rub one of the dogs. “I often think of her.”
Isak shakes the flour off his pants. “Well, she no longer thinks of you … or anyone else for that matter.”
The dogs lick the drippings from Gabriel’s spoon off the tiles.
For a while they eat the bread and drink the wine.
“Your noses.” Gabriel gestures with the spoon, feeling their discomfort. “Nostrils like an Arab horse, just the same, and your eyes.”
The dogs watch the spoon as they turn to each other.
“Tieroë,” they reply together.
“Our ouma’s saying,” Danie explains to Gabriel. “Eyes like a leopard’s,” he translates, then he turns back to Isak.“And your family?”
Isak flexes his fingers. “Like river stones.”
“Round and smooth?”
“Perhaps. I was thinking more about rolling by.”
Gabriel sets the table with blue-rimmed plates. Slowly, he spoons the cabbage sauce over the potato, the fatty water soaking into the folds of the mash. “Stamppot soos myn Oma’s recept.”
The sauce swims over the plate. Isak concentrates on the fatty whorls. They take hands and Danie says Dutch grace. The three of them sit in a row at the counter.
“Your congregation?”
Danie stops eating. “The Dutch are self-sufficient. God is a quaint concept to them.” He dismisses the topic, playing with his fork, stabbing at the slivers of cabbage. “The farmers around here are suffering; farming is a dying profession.” He looks up, pausing. “And Perron?”
Isak pulls the bottle closer, filling his glass. “We have no subsidies. Just getting poorer and poorer and no-one here or there cares a damn. Cheers!”
Gabriel opens another beer, his eyes flitting from one to the other.
Isak tastes the tannin. “The honeymoon is over; everyone believes in the new South Africa until it asks something from them.”
The cellphone in his jacket starts to ring.
“Don’t say you’ve also succumbed to one of those?” Danie looks on in mock horror. “South-African yuppie boer.”
Isak ignores the sarcasm “They steal the telephone wires, that’s why,” he explains brusquely. “If you’ll excuse me.” He walks back to the entrance hall.
Her voice fills the emptiness inside of him. “What does he look like, are you glad to see him? Can Dominique help?”
“Slowly, Amelie, we’re eating supper, I’ll speak to you later.”
“I can’t wait till then. I want to know now.”
Her forcefulness contrasts sharply with the coolness he feels from the men in the kitchen.
“Later,” he insists, feeling his anger rise towards her, “after I’ve sorted out my own mind.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Did you get my message?” He changes the topic, knowing exactly how she would push her lips, provocatively, without knowing the effect it had on him.
“Mmm … Sophy had a dream that you were coming home on Thursday and now she believes it.”
“I won’t be able to come home until I’ve got some sort of answer. It can take weeks.”
“Let’s hope we have that luxury.”
“Did wages go through?”
She hesitates. “We stood there until they gave it to us. I refused to budge.”
There is laughter from the kitchen.
“You should have been here. It was a mistake coming alone.”
He softens for a moment, staring at the photo, imagining their faces and her holding the phone, swaying from side to side as she speaks. The mountain and the sky captured in the entrance hall behind her and the bare deltoidia branches. He feels her absence intensely. All he desires is simplicity. The land without the trouble.
“Que sera sera, whatever must be must be,” she sings with little enthusiasm. “Love you,” she adds but he doesn’t reply, switching off the phone in thought.
The kitchen is warm and the dogs lie with the gammon bone between them.
“I’ll be with you,” he drops his eyes at the sight of their intimacy, “just need to fetch my things in the car.”
He opens the front door and the air is chilly. He feels uncomfortable with them, excluded, not knowing what to talk about. Without thinking he slips on Danie’s jacket, tight over the shoulders and too narrow over the chest. The dogs follow him out into the night.
Here is no wilderness and there are no stars either. The stench from the piggeries drifts over the house as he struggles to find the porch light. In the dark he guesses where the car is, all his senses sharpening to gauge the distance. The dogs keep at his heels as he steps to the right where the driveway must be but there is no driveway, just a low wall. Tripping, his knees buckle and he cannot stop it, the fall downward, head first. Down, down, down, twisting in the fall that ends with hardness so hard that his head splits open, then his shoulder, then his chest.
Then the rest of him.
Pain blackens out all thought and feeling as he lies in a pool, seeping out of his own body and nothing becomes everything.
* * *
He wakens from the hammering of many fists on the door, like a stampede of wildebeest over dry plains, driven on by raucous laughter and cursing.
Another night of fear.