‘But it’s raining on me.’
‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just …’
‘Well then, go to sleep.’
‘But I’m only just …’
‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
‘Almost anything, I should think.’
‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
A stir in my mother’s bed.
‘Shhhhh,’ my father would say hastily. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Or: ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘You know the centre of the earth is all molten, so they say?’
‘Well?’
‘Suppose they sank down a borehole and tapped it. Power. Much more effective than all these dams and things. Do you think they have thought of that yet?’
‘Bound to.’
‘You’re not much good, are you? No imagination. Not a scrap of imagination between the lot of you, that’s your trouble.’
Walls are by nature and definition flat; and having lived for so long in London, when I hear the word wall I see a flat surface, patterned or coloured smooth.
But the wall that faced my bed was not flat.
When the workmen had flung on the mud, naturally it was a little bumpy because no matter how you smooth on mud over poles, if there is a knot on the pole where a branch was chopped off, or if the pole had a bit of a bend in it, then the mud settled into the shape of bump and hollow. Sometimes, because of the age of the wall, a bit of mud had fallen out altogether and had had to be replaced, much to my regret, for the exposed poles showed themselves riddled with borer holes and other interesting matters. Once there was a mouse-nest in the space between two poles. There were five tiny pink mice which fitted easily into about an inch of my palm. The mother mouse ran away, and I diluted cow’s milk and tried to drop it off the end of a bit of cotton into the minute mouths. But a drop is always a drop; and for a baby mouse as if someone had flung a bucket of milk into its face. I nearly drowned those mice, trying to work out a way to make a drop of milk mouse-size. But it was no use, they died; and the jagged space in the wall was filled in with new mud.
The wall had been colour-washed a yellowish-white; but for some reason I have forgotten, after the brown mud had been filled in, it was not painted over, so that there was a brown patch on my wall.
I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red. The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.
High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to fragments of mud from the wall flopping down on to the floor.
And if the wall was in a continual state of disintegration and repair, an irregular variegated surface of infinite interest, then the floor was not at all the flat and even surface of convention.
Long ago, the good, hard surface of dung, mud and blood had been protected by linoleum; and this in its turn had hollowed and worn as the earth beneath had hollowed or heaved because of the working of roots or the decay of old roots. A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season. There was a crack in the mud there; the linoleum began to bulge upwards, and then split; and out came a pale, sickly, whitey-yellowish shoot which immediately turned a healthy green. We cut it off; but it sprouted up once or twice every wet season. As soon as the rains stopped, the shoot sank back, sullen and discouraged until next year, biding its time. One year I decided not to cut it. The first thing every morning I put my head out from under the mosquito net, over the edge of the bed, to see how the shoot was getting along. Very soon it was a small, green bush, pushing up against the wire of the mattress. The next thing, it would have split the mattress as it had split the linoleum. I moved the bed, thinking it would be attractive to have a tree growing in the middle of my bedroom, but my mother would have none of it. She had it chopped down, and a lot of fresh mud laid and stamped hard and flat. Next season the shoot came up at the side between the fresh bit of floor and the old, near the wall. It came pushing up with a watch clutched in its leaves. This was because my father, who had many theories about life, had a theory about watches. Foolish, he said, to buy watches costing 5 or 10 guineas which, being delicate and expensive, were bound to break soon. Better to buy a dozen turnip watches at a time, at 5s. each, from the Army and Navy Stores; and then when they broke it would not matter. He ordered a dozen watches, but they never broke: they were indestructible. As a result we had watches propped all over the house; and I had one by my bed. When it fell into a crack in the mud, I did not bother, because there were plenty more. But it reappeared in the first rains of that year, from the mud of the floor, held in the green arms of the little tree, like a Dali picture.
The only creatures that were really a threat to this house were the white ants. All that part of the country was full of ant-heaps. They can be 10, 20 feet high. After the rains, a grass-covered peak of earth which has looked dead will suddenly sprout up an extra foot or so overnight of new red granulated earth, like the turrets and pinnacles of a child’s fairy castle.
A good, hard kick will send the new earth flying and expose a mass of tunnels and galleries leading down far, far into the earth. There is always water under ant-heaps. People digging wells look for a good, old, well-established ant-heap. They follow down the tunnels. Sixty feet, a hundred feet, sometimes deeper, they are bound to come on water.
There was an ant-heap in front of the house, and another to one side; most of the time the ants remained there, but occasionally they sent outriders into the house.
On my white bedroom wall, for instance, would appear a red winding gallery, like an artery, irregularly branching. These galleries were wet at first, and granular, because each particle of earth is brought in the mouth of an ant. It is a mistake to wipe these galleries off while they are still wet, for all you achieve is a smear of red earth and crushed ants on the wall. Once dry, they can be easily brushed off, leaving only a faint, pinkish mark on the white. It is exciting to see a new gallery where none existed three hours before, and to shrink yourself ant-size and imagine yourself scurrying along under fragrant tunnels of fresh, wet earth.
It was the ants, of course, who finally conquered, for when we left that house empty in the bush, it was only a season before the ant-hills sprouted in the rooms themselves, among the quickly sprouting trees, and the red galleries must have covered all the walls and the floor. The rains were heavy that year, beating the house to its knees. And we heard that on the kopje there was no house, just a mound of greyish, rotting thatch, covered all over with red ant-galleries. And then in the next dry season a big fire swept up from the bush at the back, where the kopje fell sharp and precipitous over rocks into the big vlei, and there was nothing left of the house. Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.
One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.
Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush – supposing then that the house was still there after all?
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live.
Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.
It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls – I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.
One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.
