Free This Life by Karel Schoeman

her hand to take it from him, while I glanced up from my seat beside her and noticed it: a gesture like somany others among people who live in the same house and share the same life, passing the knife, the bowl, the leather thong, the candle, and accepting it without a further thought. Why then do I remember the passing of the pen rather than that of knife or bowl, candlestick or thong? Outside the dams were blinding in the sun, for the fountains were running strongly after the winter’s snowfall and the pools were full; among the bulrushes and the reeds the water caught the light and the hollows were sodden. Sometimes Sofie and Jacomyn would disappear together and leave me alone inside the house with Mother and her silent but unmistakable disapproval, and only at dusk would they return. Or was there only that one occasion, that evening when they arrived home agitated and afraid after the candle had already been lit in the voorhuis? They had gone for a walk to pick flowers and some children had thrown stones at them – was that the way it happened? I must have been half-asleep by that time and I only remember the agitated voices; they must have stumbled on the shelter of one of our herdsman families in some remote part, and the children they came upon were unused to strangers, or took fright at the white woman, and threw stones at them. I remember how angry and upset Mother was and how furious Jakob became, while Father tried to soothe and appease. Were they raging at the children, or was it Sofie who had infuriated them with her irresponsible behaviour? I still remember Jakob’s dark face and how he struck the table with his fist and threatened to chase the people at Bastersfontein away once and for all so that they would never return; but is that really the way it happened, was it Bastersfontein he mentioned that evening in the candlelight, or are there other memories that have become entwined with what I recall of that evening? Was that the evening when the chair fell over and the door was slammed shut? Out of cobwebs and shadows my imagination weaves illusions in an attempt to find something I can understand.Dimly, dimly, across the years, through the dreams, through the drowsiness of the child who once heard it all through a haze of sleep I remember the clamour of the angry voices by candlelight, the chair, the door; I remember the thatched roof collapsed over the walls of the house and the dried-up fountain where no mud retained a print any more.
    How rich the Roggeveld always was for a few weeks after the end of winter, when the wild flowers appeared in the bright light and cold wind of the tentative spring, the only wealth that meagre land ever knew. I remember the spekbos radiant-white like a snowfall along the rocky ridges, large patches of yellow katstert, blazing like candles, and the fields of kraaitulpe like fire, the gous-blomme and botterblomme and perdeuintjies, and when the scattered clouds swept past the sun, the entire bright veld creased and furrowed like water, and the people moving across it were like swimmers on the surface of a dam, rolling on the waves of shadow and light. As the women approached, laughing, their hands filled with flowers, their feet were tangled in the shadows; Pieter stumbles as he runs towards us and for a moment he is carried forward by the surge, his golden hair gleaming in the sun. How did Pieter manage to extricate himself from his work and slip away to come with us? Laughing, he reaches out with his hands to break his fall, laughing, he struggles against the swell and for a moment remains afloat on the heaving surface where he is caught by the sunlight, and then the dark water washes over him and obscures him from my view. The women’s voices waft away on the wind so that I can no longer hear Sofie and Jacomyn calling my name; I start, and see Sofie standing before me, her dress flapping in the wind, and the flowers she has picked fall from the careless posy she holds out