Information about the book
Katrijn van der Caab, freed slave and wigmaker’s apprentice, travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang, a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services.
The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love. Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away, Sister Vergilius, a nun at a mission hospital, wants to free herself from an austere order.
It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer – an Englishman and suspected Communist – who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born, desire is unfurling slowly.
In Claire Robertson’s majestic debut novel, two stories echo across centuries to expose that which binds us and sets us free.
EXTRACT
It did not rain that afternoon but the evening had the feeling of rain, so the men of Vogelzang heaved the wagon with the fortepiano through the double doors on the wainwright’s end and into the workshop. There boys folded back the canvas and loosed some of the ropes holding the machine tight to the bed. They lit candles and lanterns, and chairs were brought for Master and Madam and their daughter and for Le Voir. Through the bustle I watched the knecht count the chairs; he left and returned with one for himself and set it down with the others, though slightly apart.
All of the estate was there, from Derde Susann to the meanest boy who lived Sunday to Sunday with the goats. The boys helped the music master onto the wagon bed and placed a chair for him. He started to see so many of us, seated in the rafters, leaning against tables and saddles, but made a bow and seated himself at the wider end of the machine. He raised his hands and placed them above the black keys, then moved his hands upon them with a motion somewhat like a dandy drawing attention to his fine waist coat by playing his spread fingers upon it. Then there was not a sound in the workshop but the dreadful noise from the instrument – a flat clanging, if I can describe it thus, the sound lemon juice on a tooth might make if it had a voice. We might have yet listened in amazement, for how were we to know this was not how this sort of music was meant to sound and the fault lay with us? had the dogs not set to howling every one, so perfectly giving voice to our own feeling that there came giggles and then hoots. The music master stopped, stood up on the wagon bed, turned stiffly this way and that way and made as if to step down, then rethought himself and held up his hands for silence: the instrument was yet suffering from the horrible – the horrible! – journey; we must grant him a moment to restore or partly restore its tone at least.
Someone kicked the dogs to hush them and cuffed the children and we watched as more ropes were undone and the music man delved into the belly of the machine to pull at the strings – for within it was strung like a guitar or many guitars and these struck with small wood hammers to bring out the sound – and producing a noise almost as bad to hear as the deliberate music but yet an entertainment to watch. Then he was satisfied and again we were quiet and he held his hands above the keys, then lowered them and it began, with the dropping of one pure sound, a whole sound in itself, then an insolent age before the next, holding us there until it came and making even the silence a new thing, thrilling us then with a run, the softer notes laying a path for the ones that chimed clearer. The patterns and repeats of the music put me in mind of a beautiful something held up for us to see from different sides, as though by family slaves at an estate sale.
I watched the shoulders of one of the little boys in front of me grow tight as the notes drifted higher. At my side, Derde Susann’s eyes were closed. Her face was lifted towards the fortepiano wagon. Her mouth moved slightly – she was trying to catch the notes, to put her voice to them. On the wagon bed the music master frowned and thought hard, swaying his body to and from the machine as he gathered up all the lines of the song and brought them back down until they no longer crossed one another to make patterns on aether but returned to being part of one thing, and it ended.
We were unsure. For a moment there was thick silence then Le Voir cleared his throat and called ‘Bravo!’, and we followed with shouts and clapped hands. This time the music man’s bow was deep enough that his wig must have slipped had he kept it longer. He held up his hand until our noise fell off, then signalled to those at the edge of the wagon and we were surprised when three of our Vogelzang men climbed up to join him there. Others handed them their instruments; these were the estate’s band of minstrels who played at dances and kept time for stamping out the grapes. A few months before all you had heard was songs without end from the cellars, the music relying for its excellence on how sober were the players at that moment. But those songs were a handful of water next to the sea in relation to the music we had now heard.
The men were shy up on the wagon. The music master quietened the buzz of voices and spoke. The piece that this ensemble – he smiled at the word, but in a kind way – was to present had been scored for cello, viola and harpsichord but he and his fellow musicians – at which the man with the plucking bass and a lad, the one with the mandolin, cast a look at those hooting up at them – his fellow musicians had practised that afternoon and would present their interpretation on plucking bass, mandolin, guitar and fortepiano.
Well.
It was one thing to hear a new sort of music coming from a new sort of machine, but to see our scratch band around it, standing by their rough and patched boxes – to see, yes, and to hear! It began with the plucking bass. The master waved one hand in the air then cut downwards and at the same time nodded and the bass man played four slow notes, descending and staying low for another four steps like a man walking in quiet thought. I kept my eye on him – his hands held to that same pattern on the strings, over and over, well into the song. After the first eight he was joined by the guitar, plucking his four, then four, notes, almost the same, just different enough to excite the ear, like a round sung by children. Sure enough the mandolin joined for the third round and it with a degree more freedom than the other two. All the while the music master’s hand kept time but now that fell to the strict motion of his head as he joined them, not with four notes following four but numberless notes running among them, submerging and appearing again, barefoot among the slave patterns.
Now Vogelzang’s three played more softly although to the same rule and the fortepiano disappeared all together, as though it had moved far from us, then – my arms caught a chill – it returned, growing stronger with a forced velocity, and the Vogelzang line waked from thought and joined it. It moved higher, straining to make language with its sounds, to make a voice heard in our deeper minds, and the others supported it, then all seemed to recognise the reverend thing and the music moved to an end. The four musicians bowed together and rocked on their heels at the shout we raised.
I have thought often of that night and wondered how it might have looked from the outside had someone come to the doors: half a hundred people, variously perched, lit by tapers and lanterns, faces lit, turned upwards and along to the little stage, hands raised in the air as in faith. The shouting died, people looked at their neighbours with grins and shining eyes and made ready to leave the place, but there came a terrible roar from beyond the room – yeeeaargh! and a whip slapped the air and we could hear a wagon moving too fast, coming on the avenue with a frightening noise. yeeeaargh! Crack! and a confusion of horns and bellowing and hoarse shouts as boys slowed and skidded and stopped the thing hard by the workshop.
It had begun to rain. We in the lit room crowded at the double doors to look as it came level. A lantern held by a boy showed within the wagon and we could see, across the small distance, a pallet and on it a sunken, fevered somebody and all we heard was the rain and the hard breathing of the oxen until a shriek with one voice, Madam and Jansie: ‘Bastiaan!’
Beside me Derde Susann said under her breath, ‘Beloved God.’ And then she was ordering this and that man to carry the pallet and the young man to his lordlingshouse and the kitchen women to heat water and find her there. The man in the wagon was the son, the brother, come back to Vogelzang.
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by Claire Robertson
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