• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 819 0

she pointed out the most valuable pieces to you and tied labels to the legs. The books she and Jak wanted to get rid of, all of them, but you stopped them. Don’t think that just because Pa is ill you can do as you like with his things, you said. Many of the old books were beautifully bound in leather jackets; encyclopaedias and reference works on insects and animal behaviour and rocks; also dated popular-science works that had belonged to your father. They’ll look good in the sitting room, you said, and you never know when you may need information on unlikely subjects. You packed them in the shelves next to the poetry collections, the novels and dramas you’d read at university, next to T.S. Eliot and Donne and Hopkins and the Complete Shakespeare and the Oxford Collected Poems and Wuthering Heights and Northanger Abbey and Belydenis in die Skemer and The Cherry Orchard and Die Heks by Leipoldt and Kringloop van die Winde and The Soul of the White Ant. The old reference works with which you’d grown up, you would study them too and make them your own. Your father used to read to you from them when you were small, about the soil-flea Collembolla with the spring under its tail that could destroy a lucerne field overnight. It was part of your farming equipment, you said, while carrying in piles of the old volumes.

In addition you had the inside and the outside painted and all the woodwork sanded and varnished. You had a few small cracked panes replaced and assigned carpets and spreads and curtains to their proper places. Everything crucial was done before the wedding date. Your nest was feathered.

It was more than good enough for a start, but you couldn’t leave it at that. You nagged at Jak to help you at the last minute to paint the kitchen cabinets.

It looks bad, you said, what will the other women think of you with such kitchen cabinets? They look dirty. What will your mother think of the two of you that you can’t even do a little thing like that for yourselves? That was what he couldn’t stand. That you were threatening him with the opinions of other people. Not what you thought of him, but how others would judge him. Because that mattered greatly to him.

Then it happened. The day before the wedding. Dragged you by the hair across the back stoep of the homestead of Grootmoedersdrift. Pushed and shoved you in the chest so that you fell on the cement. Left you lying just there and walked away.

That evening you examined yourself naked in the mirror in the room of your mother’s town house in Barrydale where you were staying over before the wedding. You pulled your hair back with your hands so that the shape of your head showed. You examined your body, your features. You were not a pretty woman in the ordinary sense of the word. Your mouth was crooked, your eyes out of line, your body did not have the regularity and proportions that the magazines held up as models. Your hair was inclined to fly out in points, bat-like. It formed crowns in the wrong places.

You felt the scrapes and bruises. There was a large bump on your head. You had trouble bending one knee. You sat on your bed and cried. Stopped later. You wouldn’t appear in front of the pulpit with swollen eyes, not you.

You washed your face and put Pa’s old 78 rpm with Frauenliebe und -leben on the turntable in your room. When lovely woman stoops to folly. Kathleen Ferrier could cry on your behalf. You sewed long voile sleeves and a stand-up collar of stiff lace to your wedding dress so that nobody would notice a thing. The wedding dress was made of the finest damask from your mother’s trousseau, originally meant as a bedspread, too good for a bedspread. Between stitches you looked up into the mirror. Battered bride, you thought. Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan.

You were spoiling your wedding dress, it was starting to look like a fancy nightgown. You told your mother that the dress was too revealing. She narrowed her eyes to slits, she didn’t believe you. She knew how you dressed, revealing had never been a problem for you. Perhaps, she said, you’re not too