Moffie by Andre Carl van der Merwe

remember and forget again immediately. Nobody talks to me. They just greet me, touch my head, and then they appear to switch on their tears elsewhere.
    Five cars drive up to the place where all the dead people lie under the ground. The car doors slam. Women hold on to their skirts and hats, and their white petticoats contrast with the black.
    Past the rusty gate is a freshly dug hole. The coloured layers in the walls of the grave reflect the eternity Frankie will be entering. The minister is very serious about this business of putting Frankie into the hole. He reads from the Afrikaans Bible with foreboding, the wind fraying the end of each sentence. He makes me feel that where Frankie is going, he’ll be suffering.
    The coffin is lowered on ropes. It swings forward and hits the top end of the grave. Some soil is dislodged and falls on the lid, and I imagine Frankie’s head hitting against the gravel. My mother and father are beyond caring about the wind or anything else.
    From behind the wall I hear voices. The farm workers are singing a hymn for my brother. They are not allowed inside the white people’s walls, but their weather-beaten faces are distorted with compassion. They stand in their ragged clothing, under which one can see their emaciated frames. It is they who touch me, for pity is part of their design; suffering and understanding ingrained. It is their anguish I will never forget.
    High above us the sky is filled with flaky clouds, like wallpaper on the clear blue of the big, big heaven.
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    Lunch, tea, and then the drinking. I wander amongst the people. The sounds, the movements, the black clothing all seem to blur into a marsh of indifference. Everything is so completely different now that every molecule of my world has been distorted. How dare anything exist, and not Frankie? How can my life go on when its axis has gone?
    As dusk descends, the wind dies down. From where I sit on the back steps of the kitchen, the labourer’s cottages beckon me. Their exaggerated shadows from the firelight dance against the walls and their voices are animated.
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    On my way to the cottages I come across a metal drum lying on its side, and inside I see a corgi with her four puppies. I am still staring at the perfection when Hanno arrives and beats the side of the drum with a stick. Then he strikes again, and this time he hits the mother.
    I jump up and grab the stick. Only afterwards do I realise what I’ve done. He is shocked by my reaction and leaves the stick in my hand, kicks the dog, grabs one of the puppies and walks back to the house. My bravery astonishes me. Halfway to the kitchen Hanno turns back and shouts,
    â€˜Get the fuck away from those dogs, they’re mine! I will kill them if I want to. And tomorrow I’m shooting that bitch, you sissy, you moffie!’
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    The labourers only notice me once I am standing amongst them. Their voices die down and they stare at me. They have an understanding of my grief and they don’t need to tell me. Their eyes are soft and moist from smoke and alcohol. I sit down on an old tyre, and their conversation resumes. From where I sit, I see the glow of a cold, ancient sun sliding over the vastness of the Karoo. Black paint crawls from the shadows, around the small houses, and stops behind the people at the fire.
    I feel the warmth of the circle, different from Sophie’s people who seemed to grow from the earth. Sophie’s world was mud and grass; this world is tin and poverty. Their sounds are also sharper, whereas the ones at the feet of the dragon are deep, rounder. But the empathy is equally inviting.
    They can feel my grief, and to me this is sympathy. Their collective warmth gives me a comfort I have not felt since Sophie. Piet, the one who blew into the mouth of the baby springbok, smiles a toothless grin at me, and the music starts up again.
    A big woman with sagging breasts starts to sing. It is more like attrition; weeping,