Then we reached a valley with a stream that was almost dried up, and meadows and trees and cows, which gathered in the shade of a willow, like in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting. At the end of the valley lay the first farm. A large wooden house with two barns, some young men and women, lots of children, pigs and hens – I was greeted briefly, then ignored. Irene went into the house, and after a while I followed her. I found her in the kitchen; she was taking a dressing off a girl’s shoulder. She examined the wound, applied ointment from a small tin, and put on a new dressing. “She wanted to smash through the wall with her shoulder,” she said when she saw me, “she won’t do it again. Right? You won’t do that again?” The girl shook her head.

The other farm felt abandoned. The old lady who opened the door gave me a hostile, suspicious look, took Irene by the hand, pulled her inside the house and shut the door. I sat in the Jeep, taking in the decrepit house, the dilapidated barn and the rusty equipment, fighting the despondency that enveloped the farm, and wanted to envelop me too.

6

“He won’t last much longer,” said Irene as she sat back down next to me.

“And then?”

She drove off. “Then she won’t last much longer either, and the young people from the other farm will finally take over. They would have done it long ago and looked after the old folks, but they don’t want it. They’ve turned nasty.” She shrugged her shoulders. “We here are no better than you out there. At first I thought so. But it’s not true.”

“Did you become a doctor?”

“Nurse. That’s enough for most things. Without equipment, I’d be no use as a doctor.”

I imagined the scenarios, the burst appendix, the heart attack, cancer. I wondered how they taught the children; where they got their pens and paper and books. What else would the people here need from the outside world? How did the people at the first farm know each other? Were the young families who lived in the same house a commune, a sect? What had Irene looked for here, and what had she found?

“I used other people, even worse than I did you.”

“Did you take their money? Their reputation? Their life?” I said it flippantly, each outcome seemed as absurd as the next.

She laughed.

I did not like her laugh. She laughed the way you’d laugh at a bad joke, or a nasty trick, or some bad luck that you would rather cry about.

She said nothing. I had nothing to say either. Although the drive through the bush didn’t invite conversation, the silence between us was loud. When we arrived and she had parked, she stayed seated.