A VANISHED PLACE OF HEAT AND STARS

Keimoes, a small town on the Orange River, was the reference point of my childhood, though we lived in other places for the first 12 years of my life. On the outskirts of town, surrounded by four morgen (three-and-a-half hectares) of vineyard, stood a house built mostly out of mud bricks. My grandparents lived there. My mother had grown up there. Later, after my grandparents died, we moved there, and my parents christened it Viljoenhof, my mother’s maiden name. Both my parents would die in that house.