My kitchen, she wailed. My beautiful clean kitchen. I have just waxed the floor.
The Lord God has sent this Jong to us, Tromp intoned.
We will take him into our home. He will eat at our table, he will be as one of our own. But he is filthy as a kaffir. Then wash him, woman, wash him. At that moment a girl slipped timidly through the doorway behind the matronly figure of Trudi Bierman and then stiffened like a frightened fawn as she saw Manfred.
Manfred barely recognized Sarah. She had filled out, firm well-scrubbed flesh covered her elbows, which had so recently been bony lumps on sticklike arms. Her once pale cheeks were apple pink, the eyes that had been lacklustre were clear and bright, her blond hair, brushed until it shone,
was plaited into twin pigtails and pinned on top of her head, and she wore long modest but spotless skirts to her ankles.
She let out a cry and rushed at Manfred with arms outstretched, but Trudi Bierman seized her from behind and shook her soundly.
You lazy wicked girl. I left you to finish your sums. Back you go this instant. She pushed her roughly from the room and turned back to Manfred, her arms folded and her mouth pursed.
You are disgusting, she told him. Your hair is long as a girl's. Those clothes, Her expression hardened even more fearsomely. And we are Christian folk in this house. We'll have none of your father's godless wild ways, do you understand? I'm hungry, Aunt Trudi. You'll eat when everybody else eats, and not before you are clean. She looked at her husband. Menheer, will you show the boy how to build a fire in the hotwater geyser? She stood in the doorway of the tiny bathroom and remorselessly supervised his ablutions, brushing aside all his attempts at modesty and his protests at the temperature of the water, and when he faltered, taking the bar of blue mottled soap herself and scrubbing his most tender and intimate creases and folds.
Then with only a skimpy towel about his waist she led him by the ear down the back steps and sat him on a fruit box. She armed herself with a pair of sheep shears and Manfred's blond hair fell about his shoulders like wheat before the scythe. When he ran his hand over his scalp it was stubbly and bristly and the back of his neck and the skin behind his ears felt cool and draughty.
Trudi Bierman gathered up his discarded clothing with a pantomime of distaste and opened the furnace of the geyser.
Manfred was only just in time to rescue his jacket, and when she saw his expression as he backed away from her, holding the garment behind his back and surreptitiously fingering the small lumps in the lining, she shrugged.
Very well, perhaps with a wash and a few patches. In the meantime I'll find you some of the dominie's old things. Trudi Bierman took Manfred's appetite as a personal challenge to her kitchen and her culinary skills. She kept heaping his plate even before he had finished, standing over him with a ladle in one hand and the handle of the stew-pot in the other. When at last he fell back satiated, she went to fetch the milk tart from the pantry with a victorious gleam in her eye.
As strangers in the family, Manfred and Sarah were allocated the lowliest seats in the centre of the table, the two plump, pudding-faced, blond Bierman daughters sitting above them.
Sarah picked at her food so lightly that she earned Trudi Bierman's ire. I didn't cook good food for you to fiddle with, young lady. You'll sit here as long as it takes you to clean your plate, spinach and all, even if that takes all night., And Sarah chewed mechanically, never taking her eyes from Manfred's face.
It was the first time that Manfred had paid for a meal with two graces, before and after, and each of them seemed interminable. He was nodding and swaying in his chair when Tromp Bierman startled him fully awake with an Amen like a salvo of artillery.
The pastory was already groaning at the seams with Sarah and the Bierman offspring. There was no place for Manfred, so he was allocated a corner of the tool-shed at the bottom of the yard. Aunt Trudi had turned a packing case on end to act as a cupboard for his few cast-off items of clothing and there was an iron bed with a hard lumpy coir mattress and a faded old curtain hung on a string to screen his sleeping corner.
Don't waste the candle, Aunt Trudi cautioned him from the doorway of the tool-shed. You will only get a new one on the first day of each month. We are thrifty folk here.
None of your father's extravagances, thank you! Manfred pulled the thin grey blanket over his head to protect his naked scalp from the chill. It was the first time in his life that he had had a bed and room of his own and he revelled in the sensation, sniffing the aroma of axle grease and paraffin and the dead coals in the forge as he fell asleep.
He woke to a light touch on his cheek and cried out confused images rushed out of the darkness to terrify him.
He had dreamed of his father's hand, reeking of gangrene, that had reached across from the far side of the grave and he struggled up from under the blanket.
Manie, Manie. It's me. Sarah's voice was as terrified as his own cry had been. She was silhouetted by the moonlight through the single un-curtained window, thin and shivering in a white nightdress, her hair brushed out and hanging to her shoulders in a silvery cloud.
What are you doing here? he mumbled. You mustn't come here. You must go. If they find you here they will, he broke off. He was not sure what the consequences would be, but he knew instinctively that they would be severe.
This strange but pleasant new sense of security and belonging would be shattered.
I've been so unhappy. He could tell by her voice that she was crying. Ever since you went away. The girls are so cruel they call me vuilgoed, 'trash'. They tease me because I can't read and do sums the way they can and because I speak funny. I've cried every night since you went away. Manfred's heart went out to her, and despite his nervousness at being discovered, he reached out for her and drew her down onto the bed. I'm here now. I'll look after you, Sarie, he whispered. I won't let them tease you any more. She sobbed against his neck, and he told her sternly, I don't want any more crying, Sarie. You aren't a baby any more. You must be brave. I was crying because I was happy, she sniffed.
No more crying, not even when you are happy, he ordered. Do you understand? And she nodded furiously, and made a little choking sound as she brought her tears under control.
I've thought about you every day, she whispered. I prayed to God to bring you back like you promised. Can I get
