Returning to the bones of home

Mail & Guardian

06-05-2025

Always in the blood: Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel Blood's Inner Rhyme has just been published. Photo: Brenda Veldtman
This is a lightly edited excerpt from South African author Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel
Blood's Inner Rhyme
.
It's my first visit to the Free State after spending almost a year overseas. As I turn the rented car from Bram Fischer Airport north onto the N1, my eyes throw themselves like obsessed lovers on the landscape of my youth. The world is all winter-sky, grass and harvested maizefields. I want to grasp this specific colour of grass with all my senses — foraging, caressing, tracing the benedictory plains with their blinding flax-blondness, their soft-seeded grass-plumes, all bleached by frost. It is said that one's body can only truly love one landscape. I pull over. Roll down the windows, burst from my rind, spread shoots to breathe the pure wind-dried winter air.
During the two-hour drive to Kroonstad my favourite sites greet me like close relatives: there's that clump of thorn trees where I once saw the amber smear of a jackal; here is that plain that has no single human blemish — no wire, no border, no telephone pole, not even a tree, just a lush hill of unmolested grass; beyond this farm are the four eucalyptus trees where I once ran out of petrol; in a while I will see the smoke-blue tips of the far-away Maluti Mountains, leaching their blue into the sky. My neck lifts, my blood goes quiet, the seams of my self-control loosen, my hinges are suddenly light as thistle … I am where I am supposed to be.
It's already dusk when I enter the town. In the weak streetlights it is difficult to avoid the sudden potholes, dark stretches of water or rubbish, and the enormous sombre monster-hulks of transport lorries that have parked along the main street for the night.
I press the button at the gates of Arborpark. 'I knew it was you! Always earlier than the time you gave,' my mother cries, impressed, over the intercom. I stop under the tree by her flat. The garage door lifts. 'Just come in over here.'
My mother is not one for physical contact, but the smell of her house, a mixture of tamboti wood, furniture oil, wool and mutton, enfolds me in an embrace I always miss when away from her.
She stares at me: 'Jeez, but your hair looks rejected! What was wrong with the German hairdressers?'
We burst out laughing and I hold her for a moment. My arms still vibrate from the brittle unwilling skeleton in my arms and the unexpected hump, as I take my suitcase to my room.
The single bed has various layers of my mother's woollen blankets and home-made quilts, the thick winter sheets don't go together, and a hole in the coverlet is patched with hasty stitches. By the bed on the Singer-machine table is a small glass vase with dark-red late-autumn leaves.
I slide in at my mother's table the way I've been able to throughout my life. And as always there is a small casserole with a special butterfly mutton chop, a fried egg and some baked vegetables.
'And this is Victoria,' she introduces me with unmistakable pride.
The smile around my mother's night nurse Victoria's mouth indicates that she fully reads the moment's subtext.
'And the surname?' I ask.
'Motloang.'
We shake hands.
My mother and I talk until late before we go to bed, her schedule, carefully planned by the night nurse, completely disrupted. It must be past midnight when there is a commotion at the door. It opens, the light is switched on.
'It really is you,' my mother says behind her Zimmer frame. 'I woke up and thought I must have been dreaming that you are here with me … but here you are! Are you warm enough?' Behind my mother, Victoria's concerned face appears.
The next morning at breakfast, my mother asks: 'Do you shit in the mornings or later in the day?'
My mother is a fearless and ferocious swearer, but for a moment I'm lost: 'What on earth are you talking about?'
'We have been without water for a week. I have one big bottle of water, but that's for tea and drinking. If you are a morning-shitter you must come with me out to the farm for ablutions. Thank goodness the man renting agreed that your sister could remain in the farmhouse … otherwise we would have had to go and beg strangers for swimming-pool water like the rest of the old people here. But if you are an afternoon person, you will have to go later by yourself — but be warned, by then it's the rest of the family's after-work shitting time.' She shakes her head. 'To think that this has become the poor farm's main activity — the flushing away of family bowel-evacuations … And you cannot even regard it as a harvest or bringing an income!'
We drive out with Lydia, a day nurse. My sister Helena rises among her roses, pruning shears in her hand: 'Everything is prepared for you.'
We do our ablutions but our eyes feast on the house where we were all once a family together, a house of sandstone and reused materials built by my mother with Simon Mtimkulu and his son David. I see how my toes spread wetly on the ironstone floor of the passage, I smell the sandstone walls and see how the winter sun casts golden blocks on the yellowwood floors in the bedrooms.
When the three of us walk back to the car, cleansed and with empty colons, Helena calls me aside. 'The tenant came yesterday and said he doesn't know how long he can still rent here. Last week a fence was simply cut, and five cattle stolen.'
Later in the afternoon, after coffee and rusks, my mother asks that I sort her photographs — 'snaps', she calls them. Among them is one of her as a four- or five-year-old girl on a large block of sandstone with a cat in her arms. I look at my mother where she is sitting now with her legs in the sun, one hand lightly caressing a cat lying like a loose apron on her lap. Cats and horses are her two great loves. 'The cat in the photo looks moerig!' I say.
'It was an old cat when it arrived on the yard, so it was called Oukat. First, he belonged to your uncle Danie, who clipped his whiskers, took him along when hunting porcupines and fed him finches until he vomited feathers. After that he was Aunt Nooientjie's cat. She dressed him in doll's clothes and pushed him in a pram. I will never forget one Sunday, when there were visitors drinking coffee on the stoep, he came across the grass, hind legs stepping high to miss the seam of the doll's dress, bonnet askew on his head, with a massive rat in his jaws. Eventually he became mine and we respected each other.'
'So, this isn't the cat that always lay at Great Granny's feet, and the day before her death leapt off the bed, as if it knew she was going to die?'
'No, that was Swartkat. But look at this one here … she understands me so well. When I am upset, or restless, then she determinedly climbs onto my lap as if to say: 'Stop your nonsense, look here we both are, count your blessings!''
Blood's Inner Rhyme
is published by Penguin Random House.