Chapter six
And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
Revelation 20:10
After that fierce rainstorm flooded every hole, crack and dry riverbed in the Breipaal district, a suddenly homeless geelslang needed more sheltered accommodation and moved into the dark and snug cellar of the Haasbroek house. Geelslang means yellow snake, of course, an apt description of most of the cape cobra’s skin color. It’s also named koper kapel, copper cobra, and xivatla nkombe in the Xitsonga language. Call it what you will, the snake appears in the Karoo’s ancient cave art as a symbol of death and everyone around here knows that’s no lie.
So, without her knowledge, Leah Haasbroek has a venomous unwelcome guest living under the house. More on this squatter later.
That early Sunday morning, on the front stoep of the Haasbroek house, a human geelslang returns Breggie’s friendly greeting with a wry snort. “It’s morning, alright, but there’s nothing good about it, Breggie. I want to see Leah.”
Breggie forces herself to keep smiling. “I’m sorry, Oom Giel, I don’t think that’s possible. Leah is busy in her bathroom.”
Giel points his Bible at Breggie. “You tell her royal majesty to get off her throne, I’m here about the Lord’s work, we two must have a proper face-to-face before this morning’s service.”
“I don’t know, Oom Giel, but I’ll see if she’s done.”
He dismisses Breggie with an angry wave of his Bible. “Just go and get her.”
Breggie refuses to invite him in, but she leaves the front door open and hurries along the creaking corridor until it ends in a great sitting room roughly the size of a nice flat in Bloemfontein. Among luminous paintings by Leah’s mother, the famous Lena Haasbroek no longer married to Leah’s father, Flight to Egypt still occupies pride of place out of respect for its dead painter, a fine woman who was as lousy an artist as Anna Appel is today.
“I thought you said it’s my dad.” Holding a mug of coffee, Leah stands in her pyjamas under Flight to Egypt and glares at Breggie. “What does he want?”
“You, dead and buried. I didn’t say it’s your dad, you did. I didn’t invite him in.” Breggie takes the coffee out of Leah’s hand, goes off to the kitchen. “I’ll make you one when he’s gone. Put your gown on, unless you’d love to show him your nipples.”
“Lekker, thank you very much, bitch.”
Leah gets a gown from her bedroom first, slips into it as she creaks along the long corridor to the open front door where Giel Swiegers stands, a shortish but strongly built man in church suit and tie.
Meester is here, Leah realizes. When you share a house this long with a ghost you feel his presence without seeing him.
“Oom Giel.” She refuses to waste her or the old snake’s time with a forced smile or friendly gesture, they are sworn enemies and both know it. “You wanted to see me about something.”
He starts waving his Bible before he opens his mouth.
The village gossips say:
Giel likes shouting but he doesn’t have to shout scripture to strike the fear of God into you, he already wields his Bible like a bleddy hammer.
“Haasbroek, you and my daughter don’t know your Bible.” He’s not shouting yet. “You sin under the roof of our farmhouse with heathens from another land.”
“Do not judge,” Leah says quietly, “or you too will be judged. Matthew seven. You should Bible study it with Sister Sanna.”
“Matthew also says.” He’s getting louder now, shakes the Bible at her. “Why look at the sawdust in my eye but you can’t see the plank in your own eye?”
“Nice, spoken like a true hypocrite.”
“Hear yourself. How dare you speak like this to me? You should excuse yourself from doing Sunday service. Someone like you has no right to teach the Word to others.”
“Of course, of course, this is why you’re really here. I am far too sinful, too female, too loud-mouthed and so on and so forth. Only a righteous and properly decent male like Giel bleddy Swiegers should preach from the pulpit.”
“You cow! Watch out for false prophets!” Still getting louder. “They come to you in sheep’s clothing!”
Leah is this close to shouting back, finds it a struggle to keep her voice down. “Not to mention in dresses and pants, how dare we women wear sinful pants.”
“Read Revelation twenty verse ten!” The shouting makes his eyes bulge. “And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were! Is this what you and my daughter want? To be tormented forever?”
“Eina, ouch, I didn’t know our loving Father was hard of hearing. I suspect even the dead under the Long Trees can hear you.”
Eyes wide, blood pressure so high the skin on his head glows red through his thinning hair, Giel opens his mouth even wider to shout even harder. But something flies right into his mouth. It’s a quick, dark flash of what could be a fly or a bee or something.
He heaves, he coughs, his red coloring turns a fiery purple and sweat starts streaming out of his hair, into his eyes and down over his face. The Bible slips from his grip and a thin, high sound fights to escape from his throat; he can’t get air into his lungs and Leah just manages to catch him before he falls and hurts himself on the polished cement of the red stoep.
Breggie helps her drag him to a sofa in the sitting room. On the way there, down the creaking corridor, their feet make a thunder of noise and it shakes the dark in the cellar below.
The snake slowly wakes up.
“Steak knife! Quick!” Leah screams.
Breggie is back with the knife in seconds. Leah stabs an air hole in Giel’s throat, quickly, deftly, the way Hennie the Vet taught her when they were sleeping together and she was still thinking of studying for a doctor’s degree.
Giel gulps and starts breathing, bloody bubbles flickering in the air hole. Breggie calls the township clinic on her phone while Leah gets dressed for church. Sister Sanna arrives within minutes, the clinic’s Hi-Ace bus crunching to a halt outside the front gate. She comes running with her brown medical bag, pale in the face yet calm and professional, makes a soothing noise while looking in Giel’s throat with a baby torch. He stares up at her but keep his mouth shut, yellow snot running from his nose into his thick grey moustache. She gently places a pink plaster over the air hole, and sticks a needle in his arm. He tries to speak to her, manages a few incoherent words, falls asleep.
“Whatever it was, I’m sure he swallowed it,” she tells Breggie. “What happened? What was he doing here? I thought he went to church.”
“He was probably on his way there.” Leah calmly enters from her bedroom, ready for church. “He came by to tell me I’m a slut and shouldn’t be allowed to preach today…or any day, I suppose.”
Sanna looks at Leah, firmly hiding whatever she’s feeling. “Oom Giel said he was preaching today.”
“Yes, Sanna, I’m sure that was the plan.”
“Don’t be angry with me. Did he get physical with you?”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“I think he was about to,” Breggie says. “I could hear him from the kitchen.”
“He never laid a finger on me, Sanna, something flew into his mouth. A fly, a bug, something.”
Sanna looks down at sleeping Giel and smiles sadly. “You old fool, what were you thinking? He won’t let you start something with someone living in his house.”
Leah and Breggie share a look.
In church that morning, those present mostly women with Dot and Gertjie among them, Leah reads from Matthew seven and delivers a forceful sermon on why we should not judge others.
“We are all sinners, every single one of us,” and she looks at Gertjie while saying this, “we should all beg our heavenly Father for forgiveness.”
Gertjie blinks, lowers her head.
Usually Breggie attends church when Leah is on the pulpit, but not today. The two Americans invited themselves over for coffee and cake this afternoon; according to Leah they love carrot cake and Breggie offered to bake one.
Geweld van Rensburg, Dot’s mechanic, happens to like carrot cake as well. Especially Breggie’s recipe. She will save a decent slice of today’s cake for him. Geweld has started taking her for Saturday rides on his big bike, nothing dirty happened so far, they just ride to the Vanderkloof dam for a picnic on the rocks below the mighty wall, and on the way back to the Paal they stop at his Hazel’s grave for a bit. This part of the Saturday trip Breggie finds bleddy weird.
“He’s introducing you to his late wife,” Leah said when Breggie told her about the grave visits. “Watch, the old bugger’s going to ask you to marry him.”
“He’s not that old,” Breggie said quickly.
Geweld van Rensburg was at least eighteen when Breggie came into this world. And white. Same as his future wife Hazel and her sister Dot. Who bleddy knows what Hazel really thought about race, Breggie only knows when she worked in Dot’s shop she was never treated badly. There are, of course, whites on the Paal and in the district who consider brown, yellow and black people as inferior. Giel Swiegers, to name one. In the Apartheid years he fought infamously to keep colored Christians out of the church, and today he suffers from amnesia about those days.
For her part, Breggie feels it’s high time she tried a different color. Up to now all her men were brown like her, in one case darker, and every relationship ended in a bleddy train wreck.
“Your heart is turning into a racist,” Leah laughed when she heard this. “Trust me, white men are even bigger shithouses.”
To bake white Geweld a truly delicious carrot cake, Breggie must fire up the old stove in the Haasbroek kitchen. Electrical ovens can’t do a cake justice, her mother taught her that.
And she needs wood for the fire.
Before last winter, the autumn days already turning dripping faucets into towers of ice, Leah bought a whole forest of wood. Gertjie wanted to remove a pine forest from a valley on the farm. She needed another dam, not more of nature drinking her scarce water. She asked a fair price, provided Leah got the bleddy forest off the farm as soon as possible. Leah hired fifteen out-of-work men from the township, rented them petrol saws to turn the pine forest into firewood and stack all of it in her enormous cellar.
Yes, the Haasbroek cellar. She calculated she would have enough fuel for her four fireplaces to keep three or four Karoo winters outside the house. Yes, the house with the dark cellar where the snake lives.
Breggie gets the key for the cellar padlock and goes out the back. Around here, of course, in the clean and quiet desert air, sound really travels. The church is only two streets away. She hears Leah and her congregation sing The Lord Is My Salvation, and starts singing along with them. Birds are plundering figs from the backyard’s gnarled old trees again, and their singing joins with Breggie’s and the church hymn:
The grace of God has reached for me
and pulled me from the raging sea.
You have to be a Hobbit to get into the Haasbroek cellar. Still singing, she crouches and unlocks the great padlock on the little door. There’s rust on the metal and the stubborn padlock makes its own creaking noise.
And I am safe on His solid ground,
the Lord is my salvation!
At last Breggie wrestles the cellar door open and slowly crawls inside.