This Life by Karel Schoeman

shirt in the intensifying darkness as he sinks down with arms outstretched to where my eye can no longer follow them. Their bodies, now weightless, are carried by the water into the depths, borne along the invisible stream. For a moment they turn towards each other in the swell – the pale faces with dilated eyes, the streaming hair, the outstretched arms; the surging water forces them together as in an embrace, as if in search of rescue, before they disappear together and, screaming, I jump up in my bed and recognise by the dim glow of theoil lamp my familiar room with the shutters closed against the night and Dulsie who has fallen asleep on the rug beside the bed where she is watching over me.
    It is quiet, no sound can be heard in the emptiness of the night. Silence, darkness; wait for the cocks to start crowing in the dark, wait for the first greyness to become visible through the shutters, for the girl to wake up and stir and feel around to light the candle. Nothing.
    That summer – I remember nothing; silence and darkness. The eagle’s feather in the sky, the vulture’s feather, the feather motionless in the sky. The jackal on the ridge, the wild cats emerging from the rocky clefts at night to attack the sheep flocks. The whitened bones of some animal on the rocks in the narrow ravine, or the sudden brightness of blood on a rock. Who heard the cry?
    What more? I do not remember anything more about that summer, it is dark before my eyes, silence is all around me after the stream of memories that has engulfed me. The shot echoing among the cliffs, startling the chattering baboons, thundering back and forth among the cliffs, just about to die away when the boom of another rifle from an adjacent kloof starts up the echoes anew. In the house the women jump up from where they are sitting in the voorhuis and run outside, and I see the white knuckles of Sofie’s hand. But no, that was another time, and the hunters firing their rifles miles away in the kloof were out of earshot. There had been no shot anyway, it was that he had lost his footing, his foot on the rock, his head against the rock. I cannot remember any more; I do not know any more. I do not want to remember any more.
    Wait; wait without thinking or forcing, hear the silence without listening, and stare wide-eyed into the dark. The night will pass; perhaps the night will pass without the need to remember. Wait.
    Sofie’s hand, the knuckles white; Sofie raising her hand to touch the blood on her face; Sofie, her long hair screening her face from the candlelight. Did he strike her? How do I know this, and was there no one to intervene?
    Do not try to remember. What do I know? Simple facts that may be accounted for simply, without trying to establish pattern, meaning or coherence, without searching for more, but even that is too much.
    She was not happy with us or with Jakob, of course not, but how much did I ever really know about that, except for the chair overturning, the door being slammed or the angry voices in the other room, and who can say whether these things concerned Sofie and Jakob? I can still picture Sofie clearly with the blood on her face, but is it memory or imagination? The fields of spring flowers I remember, but there were many springtimes, and can I still distinguish between one year and another? That they fell, stumbled and sank down into the dark water, of course I never saw anything of the sort, but how can I distinguish between memory and imagination when one image is as clear to me as the other? Simple facts are no longer simple; every word, every image is loaded with further memories or deeper insights from which they can no longer be disentangled. If I have to remember then, if I am forced to give this account, where should I begin, and what should I mention, what omit? But I must begin.
    Summer came and the land regained its usual greyness, the sunlight was brighter; of that summer I remember heat and dust, and in the vlei the clear