Jane Rosenthal
VERLIESFONTEIN by Karel Schoeman (Human & Rousseau)
The grave of a young war hero killed in an Anglo-Boer War skirmish is what the narrator of this novel, an historian, is looking for. He and his photographer are heading for a cemetery in a Northern Cape dorp. Although the narrator dismisses as limited the value of the photograph in remaking history (abandoning the poor photographer to an endless wait in a hot car) Karel Schoeman brings to life a critical few weeks in the life of the dorp by writing almost cinematic visuals and flashbacks as a basis for those dimensions of life which the camera cannot supply, proving that the word can almost do both.
The reader should take time and attention to savour this novel (perhaps read it in conjunction with Griqua Records, edited by Schoeman). He plants images and then circles back to them again and again, as if, as the narrator eventually concedes, running a closed loop of film: a man on a verandah, a woman running across the veld, a ribbon lying in the doorway, blood in the dust.
Gradually the significance of these images unfolds in this lovely, gentle, quietly told novel, in which the reader is led, as in all the novels in the Stemme trilogy, towards revelation of a truth previously hidden.
The “irreparable loss” suffered in Verliesfontein concerns not only the death of the young Boer, but also of Adam Balie, so-called hotnotsmagistraat of the dorp. Also lost is an era of co-existence on the platteland. A confrontation with evil and darkness brings us to a place where we are “bound to acknowledge the existence of the abyss” (“Die bestaan van die afgrond is jy verplig om te erken”).
Schoeman seems compelled to illuminate the present by recreating the past. Describing the erection of a Boer War memorial , he notes that “nothing was forgotten, and forgiveness not even brought up for discussion”. As we assess the work of the truth commission, it is apt reading. Verliesfontein examines the basis of our historical identities, and is the work of a master, both playful and profound.