Small Circle of Beings (12 page)

The statues are the last to go. After the clothes, the furniture, the books have been packed into boxes and ferried away, load after load, down the hill, it is the statues that
they come to fetch. From the unlighted window where I stand to watch, it’s a bizarre and soundless sight: men in blue overalls, moving like spectres on the frost-stricken ground, uprooting
and bearing away the figures of horses, men, snakes. Cedric watches from the stoep, hands in pockets, quiet. When they come to it, he motions them to leave the statue of the goat. Vigilant and
evil, this is for me.

Winter is on us again. Cedric goes back to his cottage at the foot of the hill, where he lived for so long before he met me. We are left again, survivors: my mother, my son, myself. We continue
to live, if that is the word, in this house, which has become, though it hardly seems possible, huger and more silent than before. The quietness has overtaken us all, so that our thoughts resound
in us like noise. I find myself often standing quite still and hearing, through the long cold passages, the cadence of the jungle about us borne in on the air. It is a slow, inevitable sound: the
soft creaking of a dark, immense, relentless progress. All around us, on the hill, trees inch up towards the light. Leaves take shape. Branches, bristling with thorns, are straining for the sky. I
mourn.

Stephen, in the occasional glimpses I catch of him, seems older to my eyes than ever. Though there are no wrinkles in his skin, his face is tired and long. Pouches have begun
to form beneath his eyes, beneath his chin. We are all older, I suppose, but it takes a conscious effort to recognise this fact. I pore over my image in the glass, but can see no change. David has
grown even taller and has more hair on his body. My mother defies time as she has done since she went mad.

Strangely, it is in Salome and Moses that I confront the passing of the years. I see them one day as the couple they are: grizzled and grey, their dark skins scored and riven like earth. They
move stiffly and with pain. They take longer in the evenings, when they set out into the bush, to fade from my sight.

And Moses, it seems, is kinder to Salome. At least he does acknowledge her as they go about their daily business. From time to time I see him cast a glance at her; I see her smile. Once, as they
walk back to their hut, the inside of which I have never seen, I see him take her by the hand. Thus joined, stepping angular and awkward as storks, they wander into the gloom of grass and
vanish.

So it is not a surprise to be approached one day by this strange black pair, who are whitening as they grow old. They are restless and uneasy, shifting on their feet, as they stand before me
where I sit in my familiar window seat that looks down the valley. Moses speaks on their behalf.

Inscrutable to the last, he says that he and his wife are tired now. They have grown old in the service of this family, having worked for my mother before me. They would like, if it is not too
much trouble, if I do not mind …

‘I understand,’ I say.

They have a son, they tell me. He and his wife are looking for work, if I thought I needed somebody, perhaps I would consider …

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

It feels strange to say goodbye to them, this odd twosome who have expended their lifetime on a house and a garden that they do not own. Without warning, as silently as they first appeared in
it, they take their leave. Before they go, Salome cups her hands and dips her head in a gesture of acknowledgement; but it feels like mockery to me. Seared, trembling as if I have been burnt, I
stand on the back stoep and watch them retreat into the thick green jungle: going, going.

Their son and his wife appear the very next day, like a youthful version of themselves. He is thirty-two, she twenty- five. What they have done till now I cannot find out; he doesn’t seem
to understand my question. I set them to work like their predecessors and reflect, as I stand back in the shade and watch them, that they too may spend their lives in this way and, one day, take
their leave of David when they are old.

This change has no effect on us; we merely go on. My mother, whom I feared would be distraught at the loss of Moses, accepts his son Lucas in his place without a second thought. As if he is his
father twenty years ago, she follows him about the lawn and gives him orders.

‘There,’ she calls. ‘Trim there. Hurry it up now.’

David is pleased at their arrival. ‘I don’t have to work in the garden anymore,’ he says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s all over now.’

Free now of trivial duties, he spends his time in his room. For some reason he closes the windows and locks his door; I must knock to gain entrance.

‘Yes?’ he says when he opens, as if he’s been disturbed.

‘What,’ I want to know, ‘are you doing in here? Why have you closed the door?’

‘That’s my business,’ he says.

‘Don’t speak to me that way,’ I cry. ‘I have a right, a right to know …’

‘Leave me alone,’ he shouts, and shuts the door. As I press my weight against it, urgent and in pain, he turns the key against me. I hammer weakly with my fists until, finally, I
subside in tears.

This is the way, now, that we must live. He has accommodated in himself a deep, relentless hatred of me that I must try to fight. He speaks little to me. He leaves the room when I come in. His
door, at all times, is locked to me, as if I have done some terrible thing for which he must forgive me. Sometimes I crack; with knotted hands I plead: ‘What is it?’ I cry. ‘What
have I done? Tell me, so that I can make it better! Please!’

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I’m your mother,’ I tell him. ‘I sat at your bedside when nobody else would. You owe me for that.’

‘I owe you nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

There are moments I suspect this may be true.

To counter his rage, to win him back, I give myself to his service. I prepare his meals, I carry them through to him. I clean his room myself. Often, for no reason, I come to him where he sits
at his desk, reading, and hover over him. ‘Is there anything you need?’ I say. ‘Is there anything, my darling, I can get for you?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘No,’ he says curtly, and turns a page.

‘You have only to call –’ I tell him.

‘Yes,’ he says.

With downcast eyes and averted head, he avoids my gaze. At other times, when it is too difficult for me, I sit beside him on the back stoep. He stiffens in his chair, but I speak before he can
leave. ‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Hm,’ he says, and scratches at his nose.

‘I love to sit out here.’

‘Hm.’

‘What did you do today?’

‘Nothing,’ he says, and rises to go. He retreats into the house, leaving me to rock gently by myself on the dark back stoep: a silly old woman, smiling vaguely to herself as if at a
joke.

There are times when my endless effort angers me. There is a day, for example, when I round on him and, without warning, amazing even myself, I raise my hand and strike. My palm catches him on
the cheek and knocks his head around: a savage blow, full of all the other blows I have failed to deliver in my life. He stares at me then, astounded, as he brings his hand up to his cheek.

Later, of course, I must plead with him through his locked and solid door. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what happened.’

There is silence, only, from within. Beneath my cheek the cool wood presses against me.

For all my remorse, however, there is another day soon afterwards when I lose control again. I fly at him, a woman possessed, raining blows upon his head. ‘You are my son,’ I scream.
‘You must love me, you must …’ But my voice trails off as he seizes me by the wrists. Our faces close, straining terribly against each other, he speaks to me through
tight-clenched teeth. ‘That is the last time you ever do that to me,’ he says. ‘Do you understand?’

When he does, eventually, let me go, it is I who, with bruised wrists and burning eyes, must run to my room and hide. I lie on my bed for two entire days, hunched on my side, while the pain in
my head rages and swells.

After this time, that familiar silence comes between us. We barely speak. It is less difficult this way: he comes and goes as he pleases. When he needs something of me, he asks, and I provide
it. For the rest, he fends for himself. He goes out a great deal. He goes, I believe, on his camping trip to the mountains. He has friends, but no girlfriends that I can see. He, like me, loves the
forests and goes for long, solitary walks under the trees. I watch him from my window-seat as he goes about his business and remember him as, yes, a little boy who once fell ill.

There are resentments I hold despite myself. I must blame him, I suppose, for what he did to me: the husband that I lost, the lover that I gained. But these were things over which he had no
control. I tell myself:
it isn’t his fault. There was nothing he could do
.

In any event, it becomes easier now to live with this knowledge. I approach closer each day to my own death, which will make nonsense of my life. I wonder how it is that I will reach my end:
will I trip down a staircase and break my neck? Will my car, on one of my numerous drives into town, swerve off the road and smash into a tree? Or will I, old and worn, slip peacefully into death
as into sleep?

These are foolish thoughts, for my mother, so much older than I, goes on. She wanders each day on the lawn about the house, surveying her domain from her fierce and shattered face. She comes to
me one day and takes me by the hand. Did I know, she whispers, that David is terribly ill?

‘No, Mother,’ I say. ‘That was long ago.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘That was now.’

Time is a meaningless affair to her. She moves without effort between past and present. But it occurs to me that there is a vision in her madness: for yes, the sickness has continued, growing
without sound in the combustion of our hearts.

It is shortly after this that David leaves, for ever and for good. He has finished his schooling and has decided, he tells me one day as I am preparing food, that he is going to the city to look
for work. He is tired of life out here so far from people. He is tired of the small and dirty town at the bottom of the hill. He wants to go to the big city, where buildings are tall, where things
are taking place. A heart is beating, he believes, in the city somewhere.

I say nothing. What is there to say? I smile to myself, because I may otherwise cry, as I slice onions in my hands.

He takes his leave on a still evening soon after Christmas. Summer is at its height. The sun is going down behind the mountains as I come out, and shadows stretch long and pale across the grass.
He is waiting on the lawn, a thin, bony figure, the beginnings of a beard on his face. He turns to me as I emerge, as if about to speak. But he says nothing as we face each other in the last blue
light. Bats are flickering through the air.

‘David,’ I say. ‘You must take care.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You too.’

‘You will come back,’ I say, ‘and visit me.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ll write, too.’

I believe he will.

I go to him. We embrace then, on the cooling grass, as we have been unable to do for years and years. We cling to each other. Then it is done. He pulls away. He bends to his rucksack on the
grass, in which he has packed his clothes. He takes it up on his shoulder. ‘Goodbye,’ he says, and starts to walk away into the forest.

‘Goodbye,’ I say. I raise a hand.

He fades between the trunks of trees.

I stand for a long while after in the cleared place behind the house. The evening deepens around me like a tide. Above my head the stars are coming out, high, frosty, and far. I am, I suppose,
at peace: though the bats continue to flutter about me.

It is a few nights later that my mother starts the fire, but I prefer to think of it, for some reason, as that night: after I turn and walk up from the grass I hear the dog barking and I smell
smoke. I begin to run. In my bedroom my mother has set fire to my bed. She stands before it, waving the box of matches in her hands and dancing from foot to foot. ‘Burn,’ she cries.
‘Oh, burn!’

‘Mother!’ I shout. ‘What have you done?’

The garden hose is outside the window and I manage to drag it in and put the fire out, but there is a great deal of smoke. The smell is dreadful. Afterwards I stand and survey the destruction:
the charred black square on which I have slept, on which I have conceived a child, on which I have dealt in love. This is the bed, I suppose, on which I too was conceived and born. It hisses now,
and smoulders. The wallpaper above it is curling and black. The floor shines with water.

‘Oh, Mother,’ I say. ‘What a mess.’

‘Lovely,’ she whispers. ‘So beautiful.’

She is a wizened woman, too old for her age. I take the matches from her. I see that she has singed her hair; there is a small burn on her hand. Sighing, I lead her from the room. I cannot sleep
here and I am tired, too tired, to clean this up tonight.

I take my mother to the bathroom and remove her clothes. For once she is willing to submit to this ordeal. I fill the bath and she climbs in. On the floor on my knees beside her, I wash her. I
lather her body, which is a yellow ancient thing, and rub it down. I soap her legs, her belly, the frail shape of her shoulders. I wash her hair. By the time I am done, the water is grey with the
dirt of many months. Though I haven’t washed myself, I feel cleaner for this labour.

I dry her with a towel. Then I dress her in one of my old white frocks. I put slippers on her feet. I brush out her grey hair about her head and pin it back. Then we both, she and I, look at
ourselves in the steamy mirror: side by side at the edge of the bath.

‘Time for bed,’ she says and claps her hands.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s late.’

‘Come on,’ she cries. ‘No dawdling. It’s a long day tomorrow.’

She leads me by the hand up the passage to the lounge. There she has laid a mattress on the floor in front of the fireplace, where the coals are glowing. I undress and roll into bed. She gets
down on her knees and kisses me.