Ons Pa het 'n erf gekoop

en 'n huis laat bou

met geld wat hy nie gehad het nie

hoe weet ek nog steeds nie

maar die mure het geruis

een baksteen op 'n belofte

Ons was sestien

skoolkinders uit Bloemfontein

met die Vrystaat nog in ons skoene

en die see nog nuut

ons het soontoe geloop na Voëlklip

sonder dat iemand gevra het waarheen

en ons was nie alleen nie

daar was ander gesinne uit die Vrystaat

en ons het 'n bende geword

'n stam met sonbrand

Toe die weermag

en Hermanus het 'n storie geword

wat ander vertel het

Op Stellenbosch

ek het vriende gebring

as bewys dat ek hoort

'n naweek van meisies en vure en vleis

Ma het na die vloere gekyk

my suster het na my gekyk

Pa het na die strandbuggie gekyk

vol sand

die enjin gedood in die duine na Gansbaai

die huis het niks gesê nie

dit het net sand in sy lakens gedra

Toe bring ek en Isolde

vir Irina en vir Tommie

om Ma en Pa te laat kyk

eerste indrukke

'n eksamen sonder vraestel

en die huis het  hulle laat slaag

Later het hulle self gekom

Ma en Pa

vir goed

en ek het gery na hulle toe

soos net 'n seun ry

dit is ook 'n soort tuiskoms

Die sleutels het na my en Isolde gegaan

om te pas

al het ons altwee geweet

dit is eintlik van ons twee

En nou is dit Isolde en Tommie se kinders

wat met sand tussen hul tone

die gang afhardloop

en ek staan in die deur

en sien 'n sestienjarige

wat nog nie weet

wat Pa hier gebou het nie

Die buurman kom elke keer

met 'n goeie hart

en sê as ons ooit wil verkoop

dan is dit hy wat koop

die erf is meer werd as wat Pa kon droom

ons glimlag

en sê nee

Dis nog 'n mooi dorp

al is dit luid en vol

met karre en kameras

en die walvisse kom nog elke jaar

asof hulle ook net wil kyk

of die huis nog staan

'n dorp wat werk

waar selfs die biblioteek

die beste in die Wes-Kaap is

Ek is gelukkig hier

en iewers in 'n hoek van die kamer

sit nog sand

wat niemand wil uitvee nie

Eers was dit net ‘n naam,

iemand uit Noord-Italië,

van waar die Alpe die lug oopkam.

Die naam het gereis voor die mense,

en Frankryk het dit gehou

soos ‘n steen in ‘n sak.

Pontaix. Dauphiné.

Sestien-agt-en-vyftig kry ‘n seun sy eerste asem

in ‘n dorp van klip en kerkklokke,

waar God nog hardop gedien is

en dit stadig gevaarlik word.

Amsterdam, sewe-en-tagtig:

‘n Franse kerk in ‘n vreemde stad,

‘n gemeente wat by lamplig sing

in die taal wat hulle nie wil vergeet nie.

‘n Volk met sy land aan sy skoene,

want ‘n land het jy solank jy kan loop.

Toe die Borssenburg.

Agt-en-tagtig. Die see het sy rekening gestuur,

en elke golf was ‘n kwitansie.

Twee jaar later skryf iemand hom neer:

‘n siek man, met vrou en een kind.

‘n Koue reël in ‘n boek,

maar kyk hoe lank ‘n reël kan leef.

‘n Jaar daarna: grond.

Naby die Bergrivier, toegeken,

‘n stuk aarde onder die berge van Franschhoek,

nie ‘n geskenk nie, ‘n belofte

wat jy met jou hande waar moet maak.

Hy het gesaai wat ‘n swak lyf kon dra,

en die vallei het sy naam geleer.

Vandag dra die grond ‘n Franse naam,

asof dit self nog onthou wie dit gekry het:

Bien Donné.

Goed gegee.

En ek wonder of hy dit geweet het,

daardie siek man met sy handvol hoop,

dat ‘n mens kan arriveer met niks

en tog iets agterlaat wat ‘n eeu lank

nog goed gegee heet.

En Marie Couteau van Soudière,

ook uit daardie berge gebore,

het langs hom die klei geknie.

Ses kinders het sy gebaar,

ses lanterns in ‘n lang donker.

Op die eerste April sewentien-agtien het sy gegaan,

op ‘n dag vir grappe,

en niemand het gelag nie.

Daar is ‘n skild, so blou soos die verte oor water:

‘n swaard regop, silwer, met ‘n goue geves,

nie ‘n swaard om te slaan nie,

maar om te staan.

En weerskante ‘n draak, silwer, klimmend,

twee wagters wat mekaar in die oë kyk

en niks laat verbygaan nie.

Ons dra hom nog:

in die kaak, in die koppigheid,

in die dors na ‘n eie stuk grond,

in die oë wat te lank na die berge kyk.

Want die verlede het ons wortels gegee,

diep in klei en Dauphiné-klip.

En die familie, hierdie lang tou gesigte,

het ons vlerke gegee.

Dis hoe ‘n siek man met een kind

vandag ‘n naam kan wees

wat nog uitstyg.

She Puts Up with Me (1)

Through stormy days and nights of calm repose,

She stands beside me, steadfast as the dawn.

My scattered thoughts like autumn leaves that blow,

My restless ways that stretch from dusk to dawn.

My faults, like stars, too numerous to count,

Yet somehow still she stays and holds my hand.

The patience in her eyes, a sacred fount,

That quenches doubts I scarcely understand.

How does she bear the chaos that I bring?

The missed appointments, words said in haste,

The songs begun that I forget to sing,

The promises like water gone to waste.

Her love endures beyond what I deserve,

A grace so rare no sonnet can preserve.

         Will We Grow Old Together? (3)

I trace the lines that mark your smiling eyes,

 And wonder if they'll deepen with the years.

Will we share sunsets under distant skies?

Will time blend all our laughter, all our tears?

I dream of silver strands among your hair,

 Two rocking chairs upon a weathered porch,

Our hands still linked, though knotted now with care,

Two flames that dance from one undying torch.

The future hides behind time's misty veil,

No mortal hand can part it or foresee.

Yet in your gaze, a promise does prevail,

 A silent vow of what's meant to be.

Through seasons changing, this I know is true:

Each day I age, I hope to age with you.

           Where Are My Real Friends?

Through crowded rooms I wander, lost in doubt,

As laughter rings like hollow bells around.

These smiling faces, what are they about?

When troubles come, will any stay their ground?

The shallow waters glitter in the sun,

But depths are where the hidden treasures rest.

The bonds that break when barely they've begun

Are not the ties that weather life's true test.

Where hide those souls who'd stand through storm and night,

 Who'd speak hard truths when falsehoods would be kind,

Who'd hold the lantern steady, burning bright

When darkest shadows cloud my weary mind?

Perhaps true friends aren't lost, but yet unfound,

 Like seeds that wait for rain beneath the ground.

A Travel Destination: Cuba  

There is a photograph I have seen more than once, taken somewhere in Havana Vieja. A man leans against a peeling turquoise wall, a cigarette between his fingers, watching nothing. Behind him, a baroque doorway opens into shadow. At the kerb, a 1955 Buick sits in the sun, its paint the colour of a bruised plum. Nothing is happening. Everything is happening.

That is Cuba as I imagine it. A place where the past is not behind you but around you, pressed up close, breathing. Where a single street corner can hold four centuries of history without anyone making a fuss about it. Where beauty and ruin have long since made their peace and learned to share the same walls.

I have not been there yet. But I have read enough, and listened enough, and looked at enough photographs in the small hours, to know that I need to go.

  The Architecture  

Havana Vieja (Old Havana) is a city that refuses to disappear. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982, its historic centre is a layered archive of stone and colour, where baroque cathedrals shoulder up against neoclassical palaces and colonial townhouses draped in bougainvillea. Walking its cobbled plazas, you are not simply sightseeing. You are reading centuries.

The Spanish founded Havana in 1519, and by the seventeenth century it had grown into one of the most strategically vital ports in the New World. Every Spanish galleon returning from the Americas passed through its narrow harbour mouth, laden with silver and sugar. The city that grew to protect and service that wealth left behind five great plazas: Plaza de Armas, Plaza Vieja, Plaza de San Francisco, Plaza del Cristo and Plaza de la Catedral, each with its own architectural character and mood, each a small world unto itself.

What draws the eye today is the beautiful contradiction at the heart of it all. Grand façades in faded ochre and rose rise beside buildings propped up with wooden scaffolding that looks as though it has been there for decades, because it has. Ornate iron balconies bloom with washing. Doorways open into cool, shadowed courtyards where time seems to have pooled and stilled. The grandeur is real; so is the decay. And somehow, together, they produce something more arresting than either could alone.

This is a city that history has marked deeply, and never quite let go.

The Revolution's Fingerprints  

On the first day of January 1959, Fidel Castro's rebel forces swept into Havana and changed everything. The Batista regime collapsed overnight, and with it, the Cuba that had existed before simply ceased to be. What replaced it was something the world had never quite seen before: a socialist state ninety miles from the coast of Florida, stubbornly, defiantly itself.

The revolution did not just reshape politics. It reshaped daily life down to its smallest details, and those details are still visible today. The most famous are the cars. When the United States imposed its trade embargo in 1962, the flow of American imports stopped dead. The gleaming Chevrolets and Buicks that had filled Havana's streets were suddenly irreplaceable, and so Cubans did what they have always done with scarcity: they improvised. Engines were rebuilt from salvaged parts. Bodies were repainted and repaired by hand. Sixty years later, these vintage automobiles still move through the city's streets, less a nostalgic quirk than a testament to ingenuity born of necessity.

Elsewhere, the revolution announces itself in other ways. Giant murals of Che Guevara gaze down from crumbling walls. Slogans painted in red and black declare loyalty to principles that the rest of the world largely abandoned a generation ago. State-run bodegas issue ration books that have been in use for over six decades. Clinics offer free healthcare in buildings that badly need repair.

As historian Ada Ferrer writes in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History, the island's story cannot be told without reckoning with the weight of that revolution, not as a distant event, but as a living presence that Cubans carry with them every day. Not always as burden. Sometimes, still, as pride.

The Soul: Afro-Cuban Culture  

If the architecture tells you what Havana looks like, and the revolution tells you how it thinks, it is the Afro-Cuban culture that tells you how it feels. It is the layer that lives closest to the surface, spilling out of open doorways in the form of drumbeats, drifting across plazas in ribbons of melody, announcing itself in the colours worn by devotees of a religion that most of the world has barely heard of.

The African roots of Cuban culture run deep. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were brought to the island between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, forced to abandon their languages and their gods, or so their captors believed. Instead, they did something more remarkable. They kept their Yoruba traditions alive by weaving them into the fabric of Cuban Catholicism, matching their orishas to Catholic saints and continuing to worship in plain sight. The result was Santería, a living spiritual tradition still practised across the island today, with its drumming ceremonies, animal sacrifices and devotion to a rich pantheon of deities.

From the same deep roots grew the music that made Cuba famous. Son cubano, the rhythmic, guitar-driven form that emerged in the eastern provinces in the late nineteenth century, travelled to Havana and eventually to the world, evolving into what we now call salsa. The 1999 documentary Buena Vista Social Club, directed by Wim Wenders, captured a generation of ageing Cuban musicians who had kept these traditions alive through decades of political upheaval, and introduced them to audiences who wept without knowing why.

That is the power of Afro-Cuban culture. It survived everything that history threw at it, and it is still singing.

Why I Want to Go  

I have never been to Cuba. I have never stood in Plaza de la Catedral as the afternoon light turns the stone walls gold, never heard a son band strike up in a bar so small the music has nowhere to go but straight through you, never sat on the Malecón sea wall at dusk watching the waves break against a city that has outlasted everything the world has thrown at it.

And yet Cuba feels, in some way I find difficult to explain, like a place I already know. Not the Cuba of tourist brochures, with its polished vintage cars and its rum cocktails. The other Cuba. The one Ada Ferrer writes about, where history is not something that happened in the past but something people are still living inside. Where a building can be crumbling and magnificent at the same time. Where a drumbeat carries the memory of ancestors who refused to be erased.

That is the Cuba I want to walk into. Not to photograph it, or consume it, but to stand inside the contradiction of it and understand, even briefly, what it means to be a place that has survived so much and still, somehow, finds reason to dance.

References

1.     Ferrer, Ada. Cuba: An American History. Scribner, 2021.

2.     DePalma, Anthony. The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times. Viking/Penguin Random House, 2020.

3.     Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. Harper & Row, 1971.

4.     Wenders, Wim (dir.). Buena Vista Social Club. Road Movies Filmproduktion, 1999.

5.     UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Old Havana and its Fortification System. Inscribed 1982. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/204

They buried David Cloete on a Tuesday, under a sky so clean it looked rinsed. The hall at the church was the same hall it had always been for funerals in that village, white plastic chairs in rows too close together, a fan in the corner pushing the heat from one side of the room to the other without doing anything to it. Someone had put his digger’s hat on top of the coffin instead of flowers, because there were no flowers to be had in June in a place that hard, and it sat there through three hymns looking like exactly what it was: an old hat, sun-bleached past its original colour, with a sweat-mark around the band that would outlast the man who’d worn it.

Colette had stood at the front with her mother on one side and an empty space on the other where her grandfather’s brother would have stood, if he hadn’t gone before him by eleven years. She had not cried in the hall. She had cried two days earlier, alone in the truck on the airstrip road, for about as long as it takes a kettle to boil and had then driven the rest of the way to the funeral home with a face dry enough to pass.

By Wednesday morning the chairs were stacked again and the casserole dishes washed and returned to their owners, except for the white enamel one nobody could put a name to, which sat on the kitchen table all that week like a small unclaimed grief of its own.

Colette’s mother had left for the airport in Upington that morning, dry-eyed, saying she’d cried what she had to cry years ago, back when there was still something to cry about changing. She had stood in the kitchen doorway with her case already in the bakkie, and the only thing she’d said about the house, the books, any of it, was: Don’t go looking for reasons in a dead man’s drawers, Colette. There aren’t any. There’s just a man who liked a hole in the ground better than he liked most of the people standing above it. Then she had got into the bakkie her cousin was driving to the airport and had not looked back at the house once.

Colette had not argued with any of it. She understood that her mother and this house had finished their business with each other long before the heart attack at the mouth of the Wondergat, and that whatever was left to be done here was hers alone to do.

She found the tin box that afternoon, under the bed, behind a coat that still held the shape of his shoulders. She sat down on the cold cement floor with it, because there was nowhere else clean enough, and because some part of her did not want to give it the height of a table yet.

Inside: a digger’s permit renewed every year since 1974, the photograph on it younger each time you turned back through the booklet. A bank statement with a balance that hadn’t moved more than a few hundred rand in eight years. A rosary that had belonged to someone before him, the beads worn pale on one side only, as if he’d always held it the same way. And under those, wrapped in a flour sack gone stiff and grey with age, forty-one identical notebooks, the marbled kind you could still buy from the trading store at Vioolsdrif if you knew to ask the right person behind the counter.

She opened the most recent one first. His handwriting had gone unsteady this last year, the letters leaning into each other like men too tired to stand up straight, but the entries kept the shape they had always kept. A date. A depth in metres. A line, no more than a line.

June 19. Quiet. Cold early. Nothing given.

June 20. Wind in the shaft all night. Slept badly at the top.

June 21. Down again. Forty years owed.

No diamonds counted anywhere that she could find. No carats, no weights, none of the small ledger-keeping a digger did for the man who came up from Springbok twice a year to buy. Just the same handful of days every June, going down, for longer than she had been alive to notice it happening.

She read further back, into the early books, the ones whose covers had softened with handling rather than age, and found a different hand altogether, younger, more deliberate, the letters upright instead of leaning, as if the man who’d written them hadn’t yet learned that nobody but himself would ever read what he set down. 1976. First proper descent. Took a stone without thinking. Slept badly for a week after. Will not do that again. And further on, perhaps a decade later, the hand changing again, settling into the shape it would keep for the rest of his life: 1987. Brought one down instead. Slept the whole night through for the first time since I started this. After that the entries thinned to the bare bones she already knew, year after year, the same handful of words doing the same handful of work.

On the Thursday she drove into town to collect the rest of his things from the police station, a low brick building behind the clinic with a queue of three people ahead of her and a ceiling fan that did for that room what the one in the church hall had done for the funeral. The sergeant who brought out the box was young enough to be her own age, and careful with her in the way young men are careful with grief they don’t yet have the practice to recognise from a distance.

“He was found by Outa Samuel, out walking his goats,” the sergeant said, sliding the box across the counter. “Mouth of the shaft, harness still clipped to the rope. Doctor reckons his heart went on the climb, near the top, not at the bottom. Made it most of the way up before it happened.” He hesitated. “His hand was closed around something when they found him. We had to note it for the report. That’s in the smaller bag, there.”

The box held his watch, stopped at twenty past four; a folding knife with a bone handle worn smooth on one side; his broken headlamp, the lens cracked in a single clean line; and, in a smaller bag inside the larger one, the stone, grey with cave dust, round as a duck’s egg and twice as heavy as it looked, with a typed evidence label still attached by a loop of string that nobody had thought, or perhaps had not wanted, to remove.

Colette signed for the box without reading what she was signing. She did not open the smaller bag in the police station. She put it, box and all, on the passenger seat of the truck, and drove home with one hand on the wheel and the other resting, without her quite deciding to put it there, on the lid.

She had grown up thinking the camp at the river was where her grandfather worked, in the ordinary sense that other children’s fathers worked at a garage or a school. It took her most of her childhood to understand that “the camp” and “the gat” were not the same place, and another decade after that to understand why nobody in the family said the second name out loud if they could avoid it.

The camp she remembered in pieces too bright to be whole: the diesel pump coughing itself awake before six, the smell of it thick and sweet in the cold air; the rocking cradle they sieved the river gravel through, her own small hands not strong enough to keep it moving at the speed the men wanted; her grandfather’s back, always turned slightly away from her, bent over the trommel as if listening for something underneath the rattle of stone on stone. He had let her find one stone, once, when she was nine, a dull little chip of nothing, by her own later judgement, though at the time he had held it up to the light with both hands like a man checking a child’s temperature.

That’s not for selling, he’d said. That one’s mine to keep.

She had assumed, all these years, that he meant sentiment. A grandfather’s stone, set aside for a granddaughter’s first find. She had not once, until she was sitting on his bedroom floor with his handwriting in her lap, wondered where that stone might be.

There was one June she remembered more clearly than the others, though she had spent a long time afterwards trying not to. She had been eleven, perhaps twelve, and her grandfather had told her she was old enough that year to come as far as the quiver tree and wait, instead of being left at the camp with the women. Klaas Witbooi had come with them in his own truck and sat with her on the flattened gravel by the blackened fire-ring while David rigged his rope and went down without a word, as if speech were something he saved for the surface.

She remembered the cold coming up out of the hole even from where she sat at the rim, a draught she could feel on the back of her hands. She remembered Klaas not looking at his watch, not once, in all the hours they sat there, because a man who checked his watch was a man telling a child, without meaning to, how much he wanted this to be over already, and Klaas Witbooi was not going to tell her that. She remembered the light going from white to gold to the blue grey the desert goes in the last hour before dark, and her grandfather’s head finally appearing at the lip of the shaft, his face the colour of the dust he’d been standing in, his hands empty.

He had not explained anything to her that evening, and she had not asked. Even at eleven, she had already learned the rule without anyone teaching it to her: you didn’t ask, not if you wanted to be allowed back as far as the quiver tree next year.

Hester Witbooi came the next morning before Colette had finished her coffee, letting herself in through the kitchen door the way old neighbours still did in that village, without knocking, calling out only after she was already most of the way inside.

She was a big, slow-moving woman with hands swollen at the knuckle from forty years of cold mornings, and she lowered herself into the chair across from Colette without being asked.

“You found his books,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Colette had not told anyone. She looked at the tin box, still on the counter where she’d left it, lid off.

“He told you about them.”

“He didn’t have to. Klaas dug with him for thirty years before his chest gave out. A man doesn’t keep something that secret from the men he works beside, not all the way, not for that long.” Hester reached over without asking and turned one of the open notebooks toward herself, glanced at the page, turned it back. “Nothing given. That’s what it says, isn’t it. Every year.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means what it says.” Hester’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile. “He went down. He left something. He didn’t take anything out. Forty years of that, near enough, and your Oupa never once sold a stone bigger than what fits under a fingernail.”

Colette thought of the bank statement, unmoving for eight years. “Then where did the money come from? The little there was?”

“The digging. The ordinary digging, up top, in the gravel, same as everyone else. That money he spent like a normal man, on the roof, on your mother’s school shoes, on the truck that’s still standing outside. What he found down in the hole, that he never spent. That was a different kind of money to him.” She paused, and her hand went still on the table. “You weren’t here in 2003.”

“I was at university.”

“Ja, well. There was a year, around then, when everyone in this valley thought their lives were about to change. The court gave the land back. Our land, the minerals under it, all of it, on paper, written down in Pretoria with a judge’s name at the bottom. Your Oupa came home from the meeting that day and didn’t say a word for three days, and on the fourth day he told Klaas he was going down to the hole that winter like always, and Klaas asked him why, now that it was theirs again, now that the company would have to deal fairly with us, and your Oupa said—” Hester stopped, and for a moment seemed to be deciding whether the rest of the sentence was hers to give away.

“Said what?”

“Said paper doesn’t carry weight the way a hand does.” Hester shrugged, as if the words had cost her something to repeat and she wanted to set the cost down quickly. “Four years later the company and our own committee signed an agreement that gave the company fifty-one and us forty-nine of something that was never theirs to divide in the first place. There was a number in the newspaper that year, some big number, meant to look like enough. It wasn’t enough. The digging at the Bay’s been dying ever since, and the men who used to work there are sitting at home now with nothing, and your Oupa just kept going down to the hole every June, the same as before the court case, the same as after. Like the paper had never happened at all.”

“You’re angry at him for that.”

It came out sharper than Colette had meant it, and Hester looked at her properly for the first time since she’d sat down.

“No,” Hester said, slowly. “I was angry at him for a long time, if you want the truth. Forty years a man could have spent fighting in the proper way, in the committee meetings, in the papers, the way Klaas fought, near enough killed himself fighting, in the end, and your Oupa spent it climbing down a hole instead, talking to a snake that’s never once shown its face to anybody living. I thought it was a kind of cowardice, dressed up as something holy so nobody could call it that to his face.” She looked down at her own hands, turning them over once as if checking they still belonged to her. “I don’t think that anymore. Not since Klaas died and I understood there’s more than one way to fight a thing that big, and some of those ways don’t look like fighting at all, from the outside.”

Colette sat with that for a while. Outside, the wind worked over the quartz field behind the house, a dry scraping sound, stone shifting against stone in movements too small to see happening.

“Did he ever say what he thought was down there?”

Hester looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that weighs how much a person can carry before deciding what to hand them.

“He never used the old name for it, not to me. My grandmother did, when I was small enough to still be frightened of the dark on purpose, for fun. A big snake, she said, older than the gods that made it, that keeps what was taken until somebody finds a way to give it back properly. Your Oupa never said that word. He just went down, every June, with something wrapped in cloth, and came up with his hands empty, and wrote in his little book like a man paying off a debt nobody else could see the paperwork for.”

“And this year?”

Hester’s eyes went to the notebook again, to the last entry, though she hadn’t read it.

“This year,” she said, “I heard he came up with something in his hand. First time in forty years.”

“Is that why you came this morning?”

Hester held her gaze without flinching from it. “I came because I buried my own husband three winters ago, and I know what it does to a person, finding out the man they loved kept a whole life going under the ground that nobody up here ever saw the shape of. I came to tell you what I know before you go looking for the rest of it yourself, because I think you’re the kind that will go looking.” She stood, slow, both hands on the table to push herself up. “And I came,” she said, at the door, not turning around, “because whatever’s in your jacket pocket right now isn’t mine to ask about, and isn’t really yours either, if you want my opinion, which you didn’t ask for. But it was his. Forty years of his. Whatever you decide, decide it as if that counts for something.”

She let herself out the way she’d let herself in, without ceremony, and Colette sat at the table a long time after the sound of her bakkie had faded back down the road toward the village, listening to the kettle she’d put on and forgotten boil itself dry on the stove.

Her mother rang that evening from Cape Town, at exactly the hour the electricity tariff dropped, as if grief were a thing best managed alongside the rest of the household accounts.

“Hester’s been to see you,” her mother said. It wasn’t a question either, in that family, apparently. “She rings me sometimes, you know. Checking I haven’t fallen into the sea.”

“She told me about the books.”

A pause, longer than the line delay accounted for. “I know about the books, Colette. I knew about them before you were born. I used to lie awake as a girl counting the days until June was over, the way other children counted toward Christmas, except backwards.” Her mother’s voice did not soften, exactly, but it lost some of its earlier brittleness.” I left because I couldn’t watch a man I loved spend his whole life paying a debt he never once let anyone help him carry. Not because I didn’t believe there was a debt. Because I did believe it, and I couldn’t stand watching him try to settle the whole of it alone, one stone at a time, like that was ever going to be enough, like any one man’s lifetime could ever be enough for what that company took.”

“Do you think it was enough?”

“I think,” her mother said, “that it was the only thing he knew how to do that didn’t involve asking anyone in Pretoria for permission first.” Down the line, faintly, Colette heard the click of her mother’s lighter, a habit she’d supposedly given up years ago. “Whatever you’ve got in your pocket, my girl, it isn’t going to fix what happened to that land, and it isn’t going to bring him back either. Don’t let it pretend to be either of those things to you. It’s just a stone. He’d be the first to tell you that, on a good day, and the last to believe it, on a bad one.”

She hung up before Colette could ask which kind of day this one had been, for either of them.

The call came that evening, while Colette was washing the one dinner plate she’d used.

“Miss Cloete? Carel Theron, from the office in Springbok. I believe you have something that came from your late grandfather. The police mentioned it when they released his effects.” A pause, professionally calibrated. “I don’t want to be indelicate, at a time like this. But that kind of stone doesn’t always keep well, sitting in a drawer. Moisture, knocks. If you’d like to bring it in, I can give you an honest valuation, no obligation. Your grandfather was a man I respected. I’d want to do right by his family.”

Colette looked at the evidence bag on the kitchen table, the stone inside it grey with cave dust, round as a duck’s egg and twice as heavy as it looked.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and did not say anything else, and after a moment Carel Theron, sounding like a man used to silences he couldn’t read, said he understood, and hung up.

She did not sleep well. Twice she got up and looked at the stone through the plastic without opening the bag, the way you might look at an animal you weren’t sure was sleeping or only pretending to.

In the morning, instead of driving straight out to the gat, she found herself taking the turn toward the Bay instead, telling herself she only wanted airtime for her phone and a proper coffee, knowing as she drove that this wasn’t true.

The old mine works stood off the road past the harbour, fenced but not guarded. She parked on the verge and looked at it for a while through the windscreen: corrugated roofs collapsed in on themselves like lungs that had finally stopped trying, a crane with no cable left on it, rust running down the side of a water tower in long orange tears that had dried mid-fall years ago and never moved again. A man was walking along the fence line with a dog on no lead, not hurrying.

She got out and asked him, because there was nobody else to ask, whether he’d worked there.

“Twenty-one years,” he said, not unfriendly, just factual. “Laid off when they cut the shifts. Nothing here now but the rehabilitation crews, and even they’ve mostly gone home.” He looked past her at the truck, at the Richtersveld permit sticker still on the windscreen from her grandfather’s last renewal. “Cloete,” he said, reading it. “You’re David’s.”

“His granddaughter.”

“He was a stubborn old man.” It was not unkind, the way he said it. “Stubborn the right way, I always thought. Most of us took what the company offered when the court gave the land back, because what else was there to take. He didn’t take anything. Just kept going up the mountain every winter like the court case never happened.” He whistled for the dog, which hadn’t gone anywhere. “Tell you the truth, some of us thought he had the better idea. Paper’s paper. You can’t eat a judgment. You can’t spend forty-nine percent of nothing.” He nodded once, the way men out here nod instead of saying goodbye and walked on along the fence with the dog drifting after him.

Colette sat in the truck a while longer before she turned the key, looking at the dead crane and the orange tears on the water tower, and then she drove back the way she’d come, past the turn for the coffee she’d never bought, out toward the gravel road and the fence two kilometres past it, and the track that existed only because forty years of the same tyres had agreed where it should be.

That evening she packed: a coil of static rope from the shed that still smelled of the diesel it had once been stored beside: a headlamp, her grandfather’s old carbide lantern as backup though she doubted she’d trust it, a harness she’d learned to rig properly during three years of fieldwork measuring borehole levels in places no engineer particularly wanted to go. She put the stone, still bagged, in the inside pocket of her jacket, against her ribs, where she would know exactly where it was without having to look.

The road to the gat left the gravel two kilometres past the last fence and went the rest of the way on a track that existed only because forty years of the same bakkie tyres had agreed, year after year, where it should be. The land on either side was the colour the Richtersveld goes in winter, not brown, not grey, something in between that has no good name, broken everywhere by quartz that threw the early light back so sharply she had to drop the visor.

The halfmens^[i] stood along the ridge above the track in their ones and twos, each leaning the same direction, north, toward nothing she had ever been able to identify, their grey trunks scarred where something, goats, or just decades had stripped the lower spines away. Further on, where the track climbed a low saddle between two outcrops, a stand of quiver trees stood apart from the rest of the slope, their bark peeling in pale gold curls thick enough to catch and hold the early light like something burning slowly from the inside. She had read once, in a textbook from her own training, that the quiver tree could live three hundred years in country like this, taking almost nothing from the soil it grew in and giving almost nothing back, simply persisting, year on year, while everything around it changed hands.

The largest of them stood nearest the bend in the track, and beneath it she found the place her grandfather had clearly parked for forty years: a flattened half-circle of gravel, a blackened ring where small fires had been lit and put out, again and again, by a man alone, and beside the ring a flat stone worn smooth on its upper face, the exact height and angle a person would choose if they wanted somewhere to sit and wait without looking like they were waiting for anything.

The hole itself did not announce itself the way she’d expected. No fence, no warning sign, nothing but a near-perfect circle in the rock, four and a half metres across, the edges worn smooth by a kind of erosion that had nothing to do with water falling from above. She lay on her stomach at the rim and shone the headlamp down and the light went a long way before it found anything to land on, and what it landed on was only more rock, twenty metres below, where the shaft she could see ended and the rest of it, the part that went sideways, the part nobody had ever fully mapped began.

She rigged the rope to the old iron stake someone had driven into the stone decades before her grandfather was ever born, tested her weight against it twice, checked the figure-eight knot a third time out of habit rather than doubt, and went down.

The cold hit her first, before the smell, before anything else, a cold that had no business sitting under a desert that had been forty degrees by ten that morning. It came up the shaft in a column, steady as breath, and by the time she was five metres down she could see it moving the fine dust on the walls in slow spirals, the way a draught moves curtain lace.

Then the smell. Sulphur, faint but unmistakable, the same smell as a struck match held too close, and under it something mineral and old that she had no name for and didn’t try to find one.

At ten metres the rock changed colour, the clean grey of the surface giving way to a darker band streaked white where water had once run and stopped running long enough ago that the streaks had calcified into something like old candle wax. She paused there, hanging, and ran her gloved hand along the band without meaning to, as if touching a scar you’ve been told about but never seen.

At fifteen metres something brushed her cheek that was not the rope and not the rock, and she went still all over before her headlamp found the source: a moth, pale and enormous, clinging to the wall at the exact height her face had passed, its wings the colour of the dust it sat in. It did not move again while she watched it, and she made herself breathe out slowly before she kept going.

The rope ran out its twenty metres almost exactly where the shaft stopped being vertical and the rock kicked sideways into a passage just tall enough to stand in if she ducked her head. She unclipped, coiled the slack, and went on with the headlamp alone, her boots finding a floor of fine grey silt that took no print and held no sound, as if the cave had been built specifically to make a person feel they weren’t there at all.

The passage narrowed twice before it widened again, each narrowing forcing her to turn her shoulders sideways and breathe out fully to pass. At the first of these her boot caught on a lip of rock she hadn’t seen, and she went down hard onto one knee, the headlamp swinging wild light across the walls before she got a hand flat against the stone and stopped herself properly. She knelt there a moment longer than the fall required, her breath loud in her own ears, and let herself consider, honestly, whether to go back up while there was still a clean and reasonable excuse for it sitting right there in her own bruised knee. Nobody would have known the difference between a woman who’d turned back because the passage was too narrow and a woman who’d turned back because she’d lost her nerve. She got up anyway, brushed the silt from her glove, and went on, because turning back would have meant carrying the question back up into daylight with her, unanswered, for the rest of her life, and some stubbornness in her that she recognised, by now, as entirely her grandfather’s, would not allow that.

At the second of these narrowings she found, at hand height, a series of marks scored into the soft rock. Not natural, she knew that before her fingers had even traced the grooves properly. Tally marks. Dozens of them, grouped in fives. She did not stop to add them up. She knew, without doing the arithmetic, roughly what the number would come to.

Further on, the wall above one low ledge was darkened with soot in a shape no wider than a man’s two hands held together, the same spot, struck again and again across forty Junes, where a carbide lamp had rested while its owner did something with his hands that the lamp itself had never been close enough to see.

Somewhere below her, further than the headlamp could reach, she began to hear water. Not a trickle. Something with weight to it, a slow continuous movement of a body of water large enough to have its own patience. She thought of the old story that the hole went all the way to the sea, sixty kilometres off, through solid rock, and did not let herself decide whether she believed it.

It was the kind of claim her own training had taught her to be suspicious of, and some part of her mind kept working at it anyway. She had spent three years logging water tables in places far less dramatic than this one, learning that the ground under a desert is rarely as dry as the desert above it believes itself to be, that water moves through old fracture lines and dissolved limestone for distances that would surprise anyone who hadn’t measured it, that a borehole forty kilometres from a river could still rise and fall on the river’s schedule if the rock between them knew how to carry the message. She did not think the sound she was hearing was the sea. She thought it more likely to be an aquifer doing, slowly and without ceremony, exactly what aquifers did everywhere, with no audience and no name attached to it at all. But she noticed, standing there in the cold with that explanation fully formed and reasonable in her head, that she did not feel any less aware of being watched for having thought it.

A sound came from somewhere ahead that was not the water, a single low note that might have been wind finding a gap in the rock or might have been something settling its weight from one position to another, and she stood absolutely still for the length of three breaths before deciding, because there was nothing else useful to decide, that it had been the wind.

The passage opened, after what felt like a hundred metres though she had no real way to measure it, into a chamber she could not see the top of. Her light found a wall, found a ledge at chest height running along it, and on the ledge, placed there, not fallen, stones.

Dozens of them. Small. Most no bigger than a pea, a few the size of a thumbnail, rough-cut, unwashed, the kind of stone that meant nothing to a buyer in Springbok until it had been to a cutter first. They were arranged not in a heap but in a long uneven row, one after another, never quite in a straight line because the rock underneath wasn’t straight either.

She counted what she could reach without disturbing the rest. Thirty-one. Ten short of the number of notebooks in the flour sack, which fit, more or less, with what she’d already read: the early years, before the habit had hardened into ritual, when he’d gone down without bringing anything back to leave at all, and one particular year, 1976, when he’d very nearly done the opposite.

She moved the headlamp along the silt at her feet, more from a habit of looking than any plan, and found what she had not let herself go looking for: a single mark in the dust, wide as her forearm was long, running the length of the chamber floor toward the sound of the water and back again, smooth-edged, continuous, with nothing on either side of it that resembled a print of any kind, paw or boot or hoof. She crouched beside it for a long time without touching it, as if crouching beside a fire that has only just gone out, unsure whether it’s safe yet to call it dead.

She did not touch the row of stones either. She stood there a long time with the cold working through her jacket and into the bag against her ribs, and counted them a second time, slower, not because she doubted the number but because her hands wanted something to do while the rest of her caught up with what they were looking at.

At the end of the row, where the ledge narrowed and the rock dipped down toward the sound of water, there was a gap. A space the exact size and shape of an egg.

She did not remember, afterwards, deciding to take the bagged stone out of her jacket. She remembered only that her hand was already moving, the plastic crackling faintly in the silence, and that for one long moment she crouched there at the edge of the ledge with her grandfather’s stone in her palm and the gap waiting in front of her, the exact size and shape it would need to be.

She thought of the photograph in the permit booklet, younger each time you turned back through it. She thought of his hands, empty, coming up out of the shaft into the blue-grey light while she sat at the rim at eleven years old not asking the question she had wanted to ask for years afterwards. She thought of Hester’s voice at the kitchen table and of the man at the fence with his dog, who had said you can’t eat a judgment in the flat voice of someone who had stopped expecting any judgment to feed him.

The choice in front of her had nothing to do with money, not really, though money sat underneath it the way the rock sat underneath the silt. Hand a debt back, after forty years, to the one man who’d ever agreed to keep paying it. Or admit that a heart can simply stop on a mountain at the end of a long climb, for no reason owed to anyone, and that everything else down here, the row, the gap, the exact shape of the space waiting for the stone in her hand was only the kind of story a valley tells itself afterwards so a death like that doesn’t get to mean nothing.

She did not think she would ever know which of those two things was true. Crouched there with the cold moving through the fabric of her jacket, she let that stand as the answer on its own: not knowing, and nothing more than that.

The water moved, somewhere below, with its slow enormous patience.

She put the stone back in its bag. She did not put it in the gap. She did not, either, turn back toward the rope with it still in her pocket as if nothing in the chamber had asked her a question. She set it down instead on the ledge beside the gap where the light from her headlamp, and whatever other light eventually found its way down here, would fall across it first of anything in the row.

Then she went home the way she’d come, hand over hand on a rope her grandfather had trusted for forty years, into a cold that thinned the higher she climbed until, near the top, it gave way all at once to the ordinary, blameless heat of the desert at noon.

She drove back past the quiver trees, past the halfmens leaning their permanent direction, past the fence two kilometres before the gravel road began again. The light in Hester’s kitchen was on when she passed the house, and Colette slowed without quite meaning to, then did not stop, not that day.

At home she took the empty evidence bag and the stone’s old plastic wrapping and burned them in the blackened ring behind the house where her grandfather used to make his small fires, and watched the smoke go up thin and straight in the windless evening, and did not write anything down about it, in any book, that night or any other.

Carel Theron called twice more over the following fortnight, each time more careful than the last. The third time she let it ring through to voicemail and did not listen to the message until a week after that, standing in the kitchen with the kettle going, and what she heard was a man telling her, gently, that he understood, that not every family wanted to sell, that he hoped she’d think of his office first if anything changed. She saved the voicemail without knowing why and never called him back.

Hester came again before Colette left, this time without letting herself in, knocking properly at the door and waiting on the step until it was opened, which Colette read, without either of them saying so, as a kind of question being asked.

“You went down,” Hester said. Not a question either, this time.

“I went down.”

“And?”

Colette thought about how to answer that for long enough that Hester’s face began, very slightly, to soften, the way a face does when it realises the silence in front of it isn’t refusal but simply a person doing the careful work of choosing true words instead of easy ones.

“There were thirty-one stones,” Colette said eventually. “Not forty-one. Thirty-one.”

Hester nodded slowly, as if this number meant something specific to her, some private arithmetic of her own involving the years Klaas had still been well enough to walk that mountain alongside his friend, or perhaps the years before that, the early ones, when a young man might still have believed there was a faster way to settle an old debt than one stone a year. She did not ask what Colette had found at the end of the row, and Colette did not tell her, and both seemed satisfied, in the end, to leave that door shut between them.

“Your mother rang me,” Hester said instead, at the gate, on her way out. “Asked if you were all right. I told her you were your grandfather’s, through and through, God help you, and she laughed for the first time I’ve heard her laugh since before your Oupa got sick. Make of that what you like.”

Colette stayed another nine days, long enough to see the estate through its first paperwork, to hand the permit booklet back to the office in town with a note explaining it would not be renewed, to sit once more at the kitchen table with the white enamel dish nobody had ever claimed and finally decide, on her own authority, that it belonged to Hester now, and to drive it round there herself rather than leave it for someone else to return.

In the morning she left for Upington she asked her cousin to stop, without quite explaining why, at the turn for the track to the gat, and sat there a moment longer than made any sense with the window down, looking at the halfmens on the ridge leaning toward whatever it was they had always leaned toward, before telling him to drive on. The truck stayed at the house, parked under the same lean-to it had stood under for thirty years, to wait for her the way it had waited for her grandfather every June of his life.

The bank balance, when the estate was finally settled six weeks later, had still not moved by more than the cost of the funeral and the lawyer’s modest fee. Colette kept the truck, had it serviced properly for the first time in years, and drove it down to Cape Town herself rather than have it transported, two days on the road with the windows down most of the way through the Karoo. She kept the forty-one notebooks too, in their flour sack, in a box of her own now, on a shelf in a flat two thousand kilometres from the hole that had taken her grandfather’s whole adult life one June at a time.

She did not go back the following June. She told herself this was about leave days, about the cost of the flight, and that this was true as far as it went.

The June after that, she found she had already booked the time off work before she had consciously decided to use it for anything, and when she packed the truck, properly hers now, she found herself reaching for the rope without having to think about where it was kept.

Whether the row on the ledge still held thirty-one stones, or thirty-two, or had quietly gone back to thirty-one in some way no one would ever have the means to verify, she did not know, and she locked the front door behind her without answering it.

She loaded the rope into the canvas bag the way her grandfather had always loaded it, coiled clockwise, the carabiner clipped through the centre so it wouldn’t shift on the long drive north, and put the bag in the back of the truck beside the lamp and the harness, and reversed out of the yard while the sun was still low enough to throw the quartz field behind the house into a long, sharp shadow, each stone casting more darkness than its own small size could account for.

^[i] The halfmens (Pachypodium namaquanum) is a real succulent native to the Richtersveld and southern Namibia.

Her boots still hold the memory of stone,

of Odesa's cobbles, winter-worn,

where cold is just the price of being born

and acacia sweetens every street, alone.

She brought them south, the way you carry trust,

not sentiment but what the years have proved,

what holds its shape however far you've moved,

what bends without breaking, stripped to must.

I watch her plant those Odesa boots. The bay

of Walker Bay spreads south, the Southern Right

at home there, certain, vast. She reads the light

on limestone, salt and wind. She holds her way.

 The city kept its exiles by the sea

and learned to read their leaving as its own:

one poet pressed his verses into stone,

and she reads water with those words, still free.

What do shoes carry that we cannot?

The lean of streets we walked before we knew

to name them leaving, always toward the blue

of water, every cobbled memory's knot.

One hundred steps and ninety-two,

worn smooth, descending to the water's rim,

where sea filled every sense beyond the brim

and she once stood and watched the future through.

At night I hear her at the door,

unlacing slowly in the half-dark hall.

The boots stand down. They know it all.

The leather holds. No less. No more.

I

Die berge staan as bewakers in die nag,

Kraaineshoogte lê verlate, leeg en stil.

Sandra kom aan met vaste, eensame wil,

sy weet nie omtrent die dorpie se gedrag

watter geheime in sy heuwels sag

sal fluister. Die ou kliniek se skil

beskut waar dokters moes ontvlug, 'n kil

patroon van dertig jaar, van geslag na geslag.

Die straatligte brand skaars, verspreid en waar,

in die berge roer iets wat geen mens verstaan,

die nag lê swaar met dreigende gesug.

Geen logika kan dit verduidelik of verklaar,

geen rasionele pad bied ‘n veilige baan

die teenwoordigheid wat wag in elke vlug.

II

Die teenwoordigheid wat wag in elke vlug

kom nader in die eerste drome aan.

By haar bed versamel skaduwees, gaan staan

'n vorm wat alle lig uitsuig, ontstig.

Hy fluister name elke woord 'n ontvlug

van vreemde kennis. ‘Kom’, sy stem por aan,

‘Antwoord my’. Sy hoor wat sy tog verstaan,

al bied haar ratio van die droom geen wegvlug.

Maar Riana het gewaarsku voor sy sterf:

wie antwoord, verdwyn opgesluk deur stroom.

Sandra klou aan wetenskaplike norm,

weerstaan die roepstem, hou vas aan haar nerf.

Elke nag kom hy sy honger vul die droom.

Die donkerte is nie meer net oppervlak of vorm.

III

Die donkerte is nie meer net oppervlak of vorm

dis waar verdwynings hul oorsprong vind.

Riana kom nie terug nie, net 'n swerm

van asgrys stof, haar spoor verdwyn, verslind.

Dan Heini wat geantwoord het ook verslind

uit die lewe. Ses name nou 'n storm

van verdwynings. Mense lewendig en warm,

dan niks, net as. Die patroon het ontbind.

Sy grawe deur rekords, vind die raad:

elke dertig jaar verdwyn sewe sonder spoor.

Elizabeth, haar ouma, toon met heldersiende wat gebeur

in notas hoe sy die ritueel gestuit het haar daad

beskryf. Die artefak versteek, die deur voor

Sandra wys. Gewys as wag teen oeroue honger-sweer.

IV

Gewys as wag teen oeroue honger-sweer,

het Elizabeth gelaat wat Sandra moet voltooi.

Elsabé grawe op die heuwels, vind al meer

en meer verwondering die nisse uitgesprei

in klip. Pre-koloniale plek van offers, besproei

met bloed van ouds. Sewe artefakte elk 'n leer

van donker kennis. Spirale ingegraveer, vereer

in antieke rituele. Beeldjie, bene al vergroei.

Hulle absorbeer die lig, trek energie, trek krag,

elkeen 'n fragment van die Oeroue se wil.

Maar een ontbreek die sewende stuk se plek is stil.

Die artefak wat Elizabeth in haar wakende dag

versteek het met vaste hand, 'n geheime baan.

Sandra moet dit vind, al kos dit haar bestaan.

V

Sandra moet dit vind, al kos dit haar bestaan

die sewende artefak, dertig jaar versteek.

By die begraafplaas waar die ou grafte staan

is Elizabeth se steen, haar naam in klip ingebreek.

‘Sy het gewaak in die donker’ so lui dit, bleek

gegraveer. 'n Geheime holte gaan oop, 'n baan

na die verlede. 'n Brief lê binne, ontslaan

van tyd se las, haar ouma se laaste teken en spreek.

Die doos lê daar, die sewende stuk sy hou

dit vas. Sy lees die brief, die swaar gebod.

Haar ouma se woorde, duidelik en klaar:

‘Die binding word mettertyd vergroei. Vertrou

my nie. Kies die laaste opdrag voor die dood

tussen sewe dood of transformasie wat jou lewe vou.’

VI

‘Tussen sewe dood of transformasie wat jou lewe vou’

 lê die keuse swaar voor Sandra.

Sy gaan na die grot waar die waterval se skou

verberg wat wag. Daar staan Elsabé en Fourie, artefakte

uitgelê in kring. Die plek vertel sy storie, artefakte

wat eeue oud is, pre-menslik in hul bou.

Sewe nisse in die rotswand uitgekap hier moes hy hou,

gebind deur offers, rituele teen die honger se gebou.

Die maanlig val nou deur die skeur, verlig

so koud die altaar in sy silwer glans.

Sandra voel die Oeroue 'n fisiese slag

wat om haar sluit. Sy honger tasbaar, gedig.

'n Teenwoordigheid wat dreig met ‘n ewige dans.

‘Kom nader’, fluister hy. Sy stem lui sag:

‘kom nader, fluister hy, ‘ons kan 'n nuwe wêreld verken.

VII

‘Kom nader’, fluister hy, ‘ons kan 'n nuwe wêreld verken

'n orde, balans wat sal duur vir eeue lank.’

Sandra sien hom nou nie net skaduwee of skim,

maar blouswart vorm wat tril, wild en krank.

Nie bloot 'n skaduwee nie 'n wese, lank

van oerenergie. Hy wys homself so vreemd, so frem:

entiteit, ouer as geskiedenis, ouer as die stem

van menslike herinnering. Hy beweeg oor die bank

van tyd, tussen dimensies. Die spoor

van wêrelde lê oop vir hom. Hier in die kus

van Kraaineshoogte vind hy rus sewe siele, sy kos.

Maar die binding word swakker, breek sy deur,

die sirkel het 'n gat. Die honger bly, sy drang, sy lus.

Hy bied 'n verdrag aan, vermy die verlies, die lus:

twee wesens wat een word deur artefakte se kus.

VIII

Twee wesens wat een word deur artefakte se kus

dit is die oplossing, Elizabeth se sin

wat sy voorspel het. Maar sy kon nie, die pyn

te veel. Sandra staan nou voor die keuse, plus

die gewig van wat dit beteken meer as rus

of lewe. Sy kan weier, kan ontken

die pad, maar dan sal nog ses verdwyn

in die siklus of sy kan instem. Dis dus

nie net 'n offer nie, maar 'n transformasie van die denke,

'n verval in iets groter, 'n kosmiese oorgang sonder wete.

Sy sien: dit is nie bloot haar teen hom nie, nie kwaad

teen goed nie, maar 'n versmelting twee wat kragte skenk,

word een. 'n Orde buite begrip. Sy moet nou die regte

pad kies nie kwaad of goed nie, maar 'n nuwe raad.

Dis nie net teen haar nie dis tussen goed en kwaad.

IX

Dis nie net teen haar nie dis tussen goed en kwaad,

maar tussen wie sy is en wat sy word.

Die artefakte lê in sirkel sewe, elke saad

van die Oeroue se wese, elke woord

van die ou ritueel eggo in die grot. Die raad

gelees in tekste oud. Fourie se woord

bewe terwyl hy lees, vrees in elke koord

van sy stem. Elsabé plaas die artefakte elke daad.

Sandra hou die sewende stuk. Sy word die brug, die slag

tussen twee wêrelde. Die gewig druk hard

op haar. Die grot lê stil. Die maan lig nou

silwer skynsel vul die ruimte. Met haar laaste mag

gee sy haar woord, sy stem wat nie sal keer of verhard

nie. Sy vertrou haar ouma. Sy gee haar woord, hou nou

haar ouma se wysheid. Sy gee haar woord, sy stem volhard.

X

Haar ouma se wysheid. Sy gee haar woord, sy stem volhard

die ritueel begin, die maanlig stroom

deur opening bo in 'n silwer droom

wat die altaar verlig. Artefakte word hard

en gloeiend. Die Oeroue se anti-lig-draad

trek nader, om haar gevleg in die groot gebrom

van kosmiese energie. Hy kom, hy kom

sy vorm van donkerte teen die nag se kaart.

Sandra voel sy herinneringe invloei

landskappe vreemder as enige teorie kan beskryf.

Ander wêrelde, wese alles bly styf

verweef met haar. Nuwe dinge in haar groei.

En hy voel háár haar menslikheid, haar lyf,

haar pyn, haar hoop. Haar liefde, pyn, haar hoop alles wat haar lewe dryf.

XI

Haar liefde, pyn, haar hoop alles wat haar lewe dryf

vloei oor in hom, en hy weer in haar. Balans.

Twee perspektiewe wat een word, verdryf

waar vyandskap was. Nou kom ‘n simbiotiese dans

van energie. Sy voel die kosmiese weldadige glans

wat deur haar stroom. Sandra is nog Sandra, maar ook styf

verweef met hom uitgebrei, nie meer net lyf

nie, maar bewussyn oor grense, tyd, verskans.

Sy sien deur mure, deur tyd. Tale word ontsluit

idiome van die kosmos, voor-menslike domein.

Die Oeroue dra nou haar menslikheid, haar vuur, haar gloed.

Saam vorm hulle iets nuuts nie strydig, nie gesluit

‘n balans op die terrein van nuwe bestaan, so rein.

Voleindig deur die saamgevoegde bloed.

Die sirkel is voltooi met presiese refrein.

XII

Die sirkel is voltooi met presiese refrein

en tog is Sandra nog haar, net anders.

Sy staan in die grot, haar nuwe chemie

sigbaar vir Elsabé en Fourie wandelaars

tussen wêrelde. Hulle sien die metamorfie:

haar oë dieper, donkerder. Die silwer stralers

van lig op haar vel. Bewegings soos 'n filosofie

van vloeiendheid buite-menslik. Sy bestaan

hulle gerus: verdwynings verby, honger stil.

Die binding permanent geen bloeddors meer, geen stryd.

Ver voel sy ander entiteite wat gluur, hul wil

teen grense druk. Maar sy en Die Oeroue een hou hulle stil

met mag wat groei. Tog is die vraag wat bly

vir hoe lank? Daar is 'n skeur. 'n Onheilspellende tyd.

Hou hulle weg. Maar vir hoe lank? Daar is 'n skeur in hul wil.

XIII

Hou hulle weg. Maar vir hoe lank? Daar is 'n skeur in hul wil

twee wêrelde. Sandra staan op die rand.

Sy gaan terug na die dorp, haar voetstappe dun en stil

 Mense kyk weg, herken nie die band

tussen die dokter en hierdie wese nie. Verstand

kan dit nie omvat nie. Sy loop nou hier tussenin

lig en skaduwee, bekend maar vreemd, begin

van iets wat nog nooit was nie buite hulle se kennis-stand.

Die artefakte leeg, hul mag in haar opgetrek, gebou.

Maar daar's 'n groter gevaar ander soort wat lê

en wag. Hulle het respek getoon tot nou.

Maar nou dat die versmelting voltooi is, soek hulle die bou

die opening, die poort, die kans om deur te gaan, te tree

na hierdie plek. Die grense dun. Die baan.

Sandra moet leer, moet reis die paaie om die maan.

XIV

Sandra moet leer, moet reis die paaie om die maan

en ander wêrelde waar antwoorde lê.

Sy sê totsiens vir Elsabé kan

haar nie meer troos nie. Die berge sê

haar naam, of is dit die Oeroue? Hulle sê

haar naam met die stem van wind en klip. Die baan

is voor haar sy stap die nag in, verlaat die menslike span.

Haar vorm vervaag in donkerte, maanlig, mis wat laag lê.

Sy is nie meer net een ding, nie meer net vlees of siel.

Sy reis deur splete in werklikheid, deur elke dag.

Elsabé bly agter te menslik om te waag

die pad wat wag. In donkerte toon die profiel

van iets wat roer nie Sandra nie. lets nuuts 'n plaag

van dreiging wat wag. Die berge hou hul slag.

Die berge staan as bewakers in die nag.

XV: KROON

Die berge staan as bewakers in die nag,

Die teenwoordigheid wat wag in elke vlug

Die donkerte is nie meer net oppervlak of vorm

Gewys as wag teen oeroue honger-sweer,

Sandra moet dit vind, al kos dit haar bestaan

‘Tussen sewe dood of transformasie wat jou lewe vou’

‘Kom nader’, fluister hy, ‘ons kan 'n nuwe wêreld verken

Twee wesens wat een word deur artefakte se kus

Dis nie net teen haar nie dis tussen goed en kwaad,

Haar ouma se wysheid. Sy gee haar woord, sy stem volhard

Haar liefde, pyn, haar hoop alles wat haar lewe dryf

Die sirkel is voltooi met presiese refrein

Hou hulle weg. Maar vir hoe lank? Daar is 'n skeur tussenin

Sandra moet leer, moet reis die paaie om die maan.

Die hond begin kort na middernag.

Marta lê in haar bed in die donker huis in Walmer Landgoed en tel die blaf soos 'n mens slae tel. Een. Twee. Drie. Dan stilte. Dan weer, vier, vyf, ses, asof die dier iets probeer bereik wat net buite sy bereik bly, iets wat hom nie loslaat nie.

Sy ken die hond. 'n Basterhond, swart met 'n wit kol op sy bors, wat elke middag teen die heining van die buurman se erf staan en die voetgangers aankyk met ooglede wat swaar lyk van al die jare. Sy het hom nog nooit 'n naam hoor noem nie. Die buurman, Daan Mostert, 'n pensioenaris met artritis in sy hande en 'n gewete wat seker ook pyn, praat selde met die bure. Groet met 'n knik. Ry sy ou Corolla in en uit soos iemand wat die wêreld op 'n veilige afstand hou.

Marta staan op. Trek haar kamerjas oor haar skouers en loop na die venster wat uitkyk oor die smal straat. Die straatlig is stukkend, al drie weke. Die straat lê in 'n soort blou duisternis onder die laat-Oktobermaan. Die berg, daar agter, is 'n swart masker teen die nag se gesig. Êrens in die verte, ver oor die dakke van die stad, klink 'n sirene en verdwyn.

Die hond blaf.

Sy sien hom nie, maar sy hoor hom: 'n hees, volgehoue roep wat klink asof dit nie meer vir mense bedoel is nie. Asof dit met iets anders praat. Die nag self, dalk. Of die stilte wat agter die nag wag.

Sy dink aan Neels, wat sewe jaar gelede in hierdie selfde slaapkamer gesterf het. Ook 'n nag soos hierdie, ook Oktober weer en 'n mond vol wind van die berg af. Die hond in die straat het ook geblaf, 'n ander hond, 'n ander nag. Sy het gedink: hoekom bly die ding nie stil nie, hoekom laat die bure dit toe? Maar toe Neels se asem opdroog soos water in 'n droë rivier, was die hond se stem die enigste ding wat haar gehou het. Iets het geweet. Iets het gesê: hier gebeur iets wat nie ongemerk mag verbygaan nie.

Sy sit die ketel aan. Die kombuis is klein en ruik na kaneel en ou hout, na al die jare wat ingekook is in sy mure. Buite blaf die hond. Die berg bly staan. Die nag  beweeg stadig na sy einde.

Teen halfvier besluit sy om aan te trek en buitentoe te gaan.

Die naglug prik in haar keelgat soos 'n eerste sluk koue water. Sy stap op die sypaadjie met sy gebarste teëls. Die munisipaliteit het beloof om dit reg te maak, maar die munisipaliteit beloof baie dinge. Sy staan voor Daan Mostert se hek. Die hond is in die agterkamer. Sy hoor hom agter die mure, saggies nou, byna 'n kreun, soos iemand wat al te lank alleen geskreeu het.

Sy klop aan die voordeur.

Niks.

Sy klop harder, en die hond se stem verander, korter, vinniger, 'n ander toon heeltemal.

Marta se hand reik na die hek se handvatsel. Dit is oop. Sy stap in.

Sy vind Daan Mostert in sy leuningstoel in die sitkamer. Die televisie is aan. 'n Stom herhalingsprogram oor die herstel van ou motors. Sy gesig is vreemd kalm, soos iemand wat net aan die slaap geraak het en dit self nog nie besef nie. Die hond sit aan sy voete en kyk op na haar met oë wat reeds weet. Reeds lankal weet.

Sy bel die nommer. Wag. Praat. Sit dan op die vloer langs die hond en sê niks.

Die ambulans kom eers vyfuur. In die tussentyd hou die hond op blaf. Hy lê sy kop op haar skoene en asem diep en stadig, soos iemand wat 'n lang taak voltooi het en rus nou kan vat.

Teen dagbreek, terwyl die son agter die Hottentots-Hollandberge begin brand en die eerste taxi's van Main Road hul enjins laat brom, dink Marta: ons het almal ons manier om die dinge te sê wat nie in woorde pas nie. Die hond het syne gehad. Sy het hare.

Sy stap huis toe in die straat wat nou rooierig gloei in die oggendlig. Vir die eerste keer in ‘n lang tyd voel die stilte om haar nie leeg nie.

Dit voel vol.

Die windpompe draai stadig in die dun atmosfeer, hul koolstofvesellemme glinster in die oranje aandgloed. Drikus Richter staan by die grensdraad van Kepler-Rus en kyk uit oor die vlaktes waar niks groei nie. Nog nie.

Veertig jaar. So lank is dit al sedert die Voortrekker III se bevrore passasiers ontwaak het, oneindig ver van Tafelberg se skaduwee. Nou, met sy sewe-en-sestigste verjaardag om die draai, besef hy dat hy nooit weer die Tafelberg sal sien nie. Hy sal hier sterf, tussen die rooibruin rotse en die vreemde lug wat te dun is om sonder 'n respirator asem te haal.

"Pa, kom kyk." Sy dogter se stem kraak oor die radio. Anneke werk by die biologiese laboratorium.

Die gang is stil. Die kolonie het net tweehonderd-en-tagtig mense – almal afstammelinge van die oorspronklike sestig. Die Aarde het hulle vergeet.

In die laboratorium vind hy Anneke by die kweekkassie. Sy's dertig, gebore hier, haar longe aangepas vir die dun lug. Sy't nooit die Aarde gesien nie, ken net stories van see en voëls en gras wat vanself groei.

"Kyk." Sy wys na die glas. Binne-in die temperature-beheerde ruimte, tussen die geneties-gemanipuleerde koring en die eksperimentele waatlemoene, staan iets wat nie daar hoort nie.

'n Vlammend-rooi blom met blare wat soos vleis lyk, dik en vlesig. Die stingel is verkeerd – te dik, met 'n tekstuur soos gevlegte koper. Dit groei uit 'n skeur in die rotsbodem.

"Het jy dit geplant?" vra Drikus.

"Pa, jy weet ons plant niks sonder goedkeuring nie. Dit het vanself gegroei. Oor drie dae."

Hy kom nader, sy hand teen die glas. Die blom beweeg effens, asof dit asem haal.

"Dis nie moontlik nie. Daar's geen plantegroei op Kepler-442b nie. Die planetêre skanderings het dit bevestig."

"Ja," sê Anneke sagkuns. "Voor ons geland het."

Drikus staar na die ding. Veertig jaar lank het hulle gesoek na tekens van lewe, enige lewe. Hulle het mikrobes gevind in die ys by die poolgletser, primitiewe dinge wat amper nie as lewend kwalifiseer nie. Maar dit... dit is kompleks. Dit is berekend.

"Het jy dit vir die raad gewys?"

"Nog nie. Ek wou jou eers raadpleeg." Sy kyk na hom met daardie blik wat hy ken – die een wat sê sy's bang maar wil dit nie wys nie. "Pa, daar's nog iets. Ek het 'n steekproef van die weefsel geneem. Die DNS... dis nie DNS nie. Dis iets anders. Iets wat werk soos DNS maar heeltemal met 'n ander basis."

Sy trek haar dataskerm nader. Die molekulêre strukture dans voor sy oë – bekend maar vreemd, soos 'n taal wat jy amper kan lees.

"Die wortelstruktuur groei. Dis al twintig meter onder die oppervlak."

"Roep 'n noodvergadering byeen."

Teen aandete is die raadsaal vol. Marna Viljoen, die kolonie se goewerneur, sit aan die bokant van die tafel. Sy's jonk vir die posisie – vyf-en-veertig – maar sy's die slimste persoon in die kolonie. Haar pa was die Voortrekker III se kaptein.

"Wys hulle," sê sy vir Anneke.

Die holografiese projeksie vul die sentrum van die kamer. Die rooiblom, nou groter, sy wortels uitgesprei soos are onder die kolonie se fondamente.

"Dit groei teen 'n tempo van vyf meter per uur," sê Anneke. "As dit so aangaan, sal dit binne ses dae die hele vallei dek. En ons weet nie wat dit doen nie, wat dit beoog nie."

"Wat beoog dit?" Dawie Rossouw, die hoofingenieur, lag bitter. "Dis 'n plant, Anneke. Dit wil niks hê nie."

"Is dit so?" Drikus staan op. "Ons het veertig jaar hier gewoon en nooit so iets gesien nie. En skielik, net nadat ons die nuwe diepboortuig begin het, net nadat ons dieper as ooit tevore gegaan het, verskyn dit."

"Jy sê ons het dit wakker gemaak?" vra Marna.

Stilte. Dan: "Ons moet dit vernietig." Dit kom van Tersia du Toit, die mediese dokter. "Voordat dit buite beheer raak."

"Nee." Anneke se stem is laag. "Dis die eerste teken van inheemse lewe. Komplekse lewe. Ons kán nie—"

"Ons moet," sê Tersia. "Ons oorlewing—"

"Ons oorlewing hang af van begrip," onderbreek Drikus. "Van weet wat ons in die gesig staar."

Marna hou haar hand op. "Vier-en-twintig uur. Ons bestudeer dit. Dan besluit ons."

Daardie nag slaap niemand nie. Drikus bly by die laboratorium, kyk hoe die blom groter word, hoe nuwe blomme begin verskyn in ander kweekkaste, in krake in die vloere, selfs tussen die voue van ou stoorsakke. Teen dagbreek – die kort, bloedrooi dagbreek van Kepler-442b – is daar honderde.

En dan gebeur dit.

Die blomme begin sing.

Dis nie 'n geluid wat ore hoor nie. Dis dieper. Drikus voel dit in sy bors, in sy bene. 'n Vibrering wat deur die hele kolonie gaan. En saam met die vibrasie kom beelde. Nie woorde nie, maar begrip.

Hy sien die planeet soos dit was, miljarde jare gelede. Oseane. Wêrelde van lewe, ryk en kompleks. En toe die ster wat neergestort het, die atmosfeer wat weggeblaas is, alles wat gesterf het. Behalwe iets. Iets wat diep gegaan het, onder die rots en die ys, wat geslaap het en gewag het.

"Dit vra of ons sal help." Anneke staan langs hom, trane oor haar wange. "Hulle wil weer groei. Hulle wil die planeet genees."

Drikus kyk na sy dogter, dan na die blomme wat nou oral is, hulle rooi blare soos vlamme.

"Ja," sê hy. "Ja, ons sal help."

Want dit, besef hy, is waarom hulle hiernatoe gekom het. Nie om te koloniseer nie, maar om te ontmoet. Om te leer dat lewe, waar dit ook al wortelskiet, 'n manier vind.

Buite begin die windpompe vinniger draai, en vir die eerste keer voel die lug minder dun.

The desk was glass, long and cold, and on clear days I could see Table Mountain from where I sat on the fourteenth floor of a building in the Cape Town CBD. The mountain’s upper slopes go tawny in winter, patched with old burns and new growth pressing through. I barely noticed it then. I was reading an opposing counsel’s affidavit, making notes in the margin, and composing a different life in my head.

I was born in Windhoek, grew up in Bloemfontein and studied law at Stellenbosch. Between Stellenbosch and the profession, there was the army, and thirteen months in Angola. I came back different in ways I did not yet have language for, and I put on a suit and got to work, because work was the thing you did with what you came back carrying.

My father was an attorney in Windhoek. By the time I finished school in Bloemfontein, he had taken silk and was practising as a senior advocate. He ended his career as a Judge of the High Court. I grew up watching him move through those chambers in his black robe, measured and certain. Law was not a choice I made so much as a landscape I was born into. The identity was waiting for me before I had the words to question it.

For three decades I practised commercial litigation. I was good at it. Being good at something that was never entirely yours is its own trap: it removes the excuse to leave. So, I stayed, and I adapted and I got sharper, and the distance between who I was in court and who I was in my own head widened without my quite noticing it happening.

Then, on an unremarkable Tuesday, I read a Toni Morrison quote circulating online. ‘If you have some power,’ she said, ‘then your job is to empower somebody else.’ I had read it before without hearing it. That day it landed differently. I had been giving my power, my sharpest hours, my best arguments, to commercial disputes. I was sixty years old. I had spent thirteen months in a war I had not chosen, and thirty years in a profession that had been chosen for me long before I was old enough to choose. The arithmetic of what remained felt suddenly and uncomfortably clear.

I had known for years that something was wrong. On Signal Hill at sunset, watching the city go orange and small below me, I would feel it settle in my chest: the longing of having always known I was better at putting words on a page than at winning arguments, and never once having said it. I kept a notebook in my desk drawer at the office. I told myself it was for drafting notes. On Signal Hill, I knew it was not.

The fynbos burns because it has to. The Cape’s entire ecosystem is built on this: the protea’s seed pods crack only under extreme heat, releasing what was held back for years. I had spent three decades trying not to burn, maintaining a surface that looked intact, while underground, and long before that in the red dust north of the Cunene River, the pressure had been building the whole time.

I left the corporate world, though not the law. I work from home now, still an attorney, but with mornings that belong to me and a notebook that is no longer pretending to be something else. My parents did not live to see me resign. I have thought about that often, wondering what my father would have made of it. He was a man who moved steadily through every rank the law offered, and I think he would have been baffled. I think, given time, he might have understood. Sadly, I cannot ask him.

In January 2024 I enrolled in a novel-writing course, Skryf ‘n Roman Kursus, not entirely sure what I expected to find there. What I found was that I already had something to say, and a way of saying it. I began writing short stories in my home study, early mornings before the working day started. A Few were published, in Huisgenoot, on LitNet. I did not know what to make of that. I kept going anyway. Die Oeroue followed, then Die Walvisspeurder. The notebook that had spent years pretending to be a legal notepad had, without my quite noticing, become the most important thing on the desk.

At my book launch in Somerset West, my sister told me she was proud of me. In all the years, she had seldom said it. She was the one our family always assumed would write, and yet there she was, proud of the wrong sibling.

What I have instead of certainty is this: mornings in Sunset Beach with my wife Irina, coffee and a notebook, a body of work that is only beginning and the sensation of being almost exactly where I chose to be, many years later than I would have liked. Almost exactly, though.

The old shell is gone. What I did not expect was this: that writing would not just fill the space it left but change the shape of everything around it: the mornings, the silences, the way I move through a room. I did not expect to be surprised, at this age, by my own life. I am.