African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441)

by Solomon, Barbara H. (EDT); Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. (EDT)

  “No, Andries. Wait a minute,” the leader who carried the shotgun said, and they all stopped between the row of trees. The man with the lantern turned and put the light on the rest of the party.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Wag’n oomblikkie. Wait a moment,” the leader said, speaking with forced casualness. “He is not dumb. He is a slim hotnot; one of those educated bushmen. Listen, hotnot,” he addressed the colored man, speaking angrily now. “When a baas speaks to you, you answer him. Do you hear?” The colored man’s wrists were tied behind him with a riem and the leader brought the muzzle of the shotgun down, pressing it hard into the small of the man’s back above where the wrists met. “Do you hear, hotnot? Answer me or I will shoot a hole through your spine.”

  The bound man felt the hard round metal of the gun muzzle through the loose raincoat and clenched his teeth. He was cold and tried to prevent himself from shivering in case it should be mistaken for cowardice. He heard the small metallic noise as the man with the gun thumbed back the hammer of the shotgun. In spite of the cold, little drops of sweat began to form on his upper lip under the overnight stubble.

  “For God’s sake, don’t shoot him,” the man with the light said, laughing a little nervously. “We don’t want to be involved in any murder.”

  “What are you saying, man?” the leader asked. Now with the beam of the battery-lamp on his face the shadows in it were washed away to reveal the mass of tiny wrinkled and deep creases which covered the red-clay complexion of his face like the myriad lines which indicate rivers, streams, roads and railways on a map. They wound around the ridges of his chin and climbed the sharp range of his nose and the peaks of his chin and cheekbones, and his eyes were hard and blue like two frozen lakes.

  “This is mos a slim hotnot,” he said again. “A teacher in a school for which we pay. He lives off our sweat, and he had the audacity to be cheeky and uncivilized towards a minister of our church and no hotnot will be cheeky to a white man while I live.”

  “Ja, man,” the lantern-bearer agreed. “But we are going to deal with him. There is no necessity to shoot him. We don’t want that kind of trouble.”

  “I will shoot whatever hotnot or kaffir I desire, and see me get into trouble over it. I demand respect from these donders. Let them answer when they’re spoken to.”

  He jabbed the muzzle suddenly into the colored man’s back so that he stumbled, struggling to keep his balance. “Do you hear, jong? Did I not speak to you?” The man who had jeered about the prisoner’s fear stepped up then, and hit him in the face, striking him on a cheekbone with the clenched fist which still held the sjambok. He was angry over the delay and wanted the man to submit so that they could proceed. “Listen, you hotnot bastard,” he said loudly. “Why don’t you answer?”

  The man stumbled, caught himself and stood in the rambling shadow of one of the lemon trees. The lantern-light swung on him and he looked away from the center of the beam. He was afraid the leader would shoot him in anger and he had no wish to die. He straightened up and looked away from them.

  “Well?” demanded the man who had struck him.

  “Yes, baas,” the bound man said, speaking with a mixture of dignity and contempt which was missed by those who surrounded him.

  “Yes there,” the man with the light said. “You could save yourself trouble. Next time you will remember. Now let us get on.” The lantern swung forward again and he walked ahead. The leader shoved their prisoner on with the muzzle of the shotgun, and he stumbled after the bobbing lantern with the other men on each side of him.

  “The amazing thing about it is that this bliksem should have taken the principal, and the meester of the church before the magistrate and demand payment for the hiding they gave him for being cheeky to them,” the leader said to all in general. “This verdomte hotnot. I have never heard of such a thing in all my born days.”

  “Well, we will give him a better hiding,” the man Andries said. “This time we will teach him a lesson, Oom. He won’t demand damages from anybody when we’re done with him.”

  “And afterwards he won’t be seen around here again. He will pack his things and go and live in the city where they’re not so particular about the dignity of the volk. Do you hear, hotnot?” This time they were not concerned about receiving a reply but the leader went on, saying, “We don’t want any educated hottentots in our town.”

  “Neither black Englishmen,” added one of the others.

  The dog started barking again at the farmhouse which was invisible on the dark hillside at the other end of the little valley. “It’s that Jagter,” the man with the lantern said. “I wonder what bothers him. He is a good watchdog. I offered Meneer Marais five pounds for that dog, but he won’t sell. I would like to have a dog like that. I would take great care of such a dog.”

  The blackness of the night crouched over the orchard and the leaves rustled with a harsh whispering that was inconsistent with the pleasant scent of the lemons. The chill in the air had increased, and far-off the creek-creek-creek of the crickets blended into solid strips of high-pitched sound. Then the moon came from behind the banks of cloud and its white light touched the leaves with wet silver, and the perfume of lemons seemed to grow stronger, as if the juice was being crushed from them.

  They walked a little way further in the moonlight and the man with the lantern said, “This is as good a place as any, Oom.”

  They had come into a wide gap in the orchard, a small amphitheater surrounded by fragrant growth, and they all stopped within it. The moonlight clung for a while to the leaves and the angled branches, so that along their tips and edges the moisture gleamed with the quivering shine of scattered quicksilver.

  DORIS LESSING

  Doris May Lessing was born on October 22, 1919, in Iran (then called Persia) to a British army captain and his wife. Lessing was schooled at Dominican Convent High School, but left at the age of fifteen to work as a maid. Encouraged by her employer, who gave her books about politics and sociology, she began writing. After two marriages and divorces, she moved to London, where she launched her writing career. Lessing is the author of many celebrated novels including The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Summer Before Dark (1973), The Fifth Child (1985), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Cleft (2007), and Alfred and Emily (2008), as well as numerous short story collections. She is justly celebrated for her humanitarian concern regarding the plight of Africans living under oppressive regimes. In 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize; she was the oldest recipient of the literature prize and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category.

  The Second Hut*

  (1951)

  Before that season and his wife’s illness, he had thought things could get no worse: until then, poverty had meant not to deviate further than the snapping point from what he had been brought up to think of as a normal life.

  Being a farmer (he had come to it late in life, in his forties) was the first test he had faced as an individual. Before he had always been supported, invisibly perhaps, but none the less strongly, by what his family expected of him. He had been a regular soldier, not an unsuccessful one, but his success had been at the cost of a continual straining against his own inclinations; and he did not know himself what his inclinations were. Something stubbornly unconforming kept him apart from his fellow officers. It was an inward difference: he did not think of himself as a soldier. Even in his appearance, square, close-bitten, disciplined, there had been a hint of softness, or of strain, showing itself in his smile, which was too quick, like the smile of a deaf person afraid of showing incomprehension, and in the anxious look of his eyes. After he left the army he quickly slackened into an almost slovenly carelessness of dress and carriage. Now, in his farm clothes there was nothing left to suggest the soldier. With a loose, stained felt hat on the back of his head, khaki shorts a little too long and too wide, sleev
es flapping over spare brown arms, his wispy moustache hiding a strained, set mouth, Major Carruthers looked what he was, a gentleman farmer going to seed.

  The house had that brave, worn appearance of those struggling to keep up appearances. It was a four-roomed shack, its red roof dulling to streaky brown. It was the sort of house an apprentice farmer builds as a temporary shelter till he can afford better. Inside, good but battered furniture stood over worn places in the rugs; the piano was out of tune and the notes stuck; the silver tea things from the big narrow house in England where his brother (a lawyer) now lived were used as ornaments, and inside were bits of paper, accounts, rubber rings, old corks.

  The room where his wife lay, in a greenish sun-lanced gloom, was a place of seedy misery. The doctor said it was her heart; and Major Carruthers knew this was true: she had broken down through heartbreak over the conditions they lived in. She did not want to get better. The harsh light from outside was shut out with dark blinds, and she turned her face to the wall and lay there, hour after hour, inert and uncomplaining, in a stoicism of defeat nothing could penetrate. Even the children hardly moved her. It was as if she had said to herself: “If I cannot have what I wanted for them, then I wash my hands of life.”

  Sometimes Major Carruthers thought of her as she had been, and was filled with uneasy wonder and with guilt. That pleasant conventional pretty English girl had been bred to make a perfect wife for the professional soldier she had imagined him to be, but chance had wrenched her on to this isolated African farm, into a life which she submitted herself to, as if it had nothing to do with her. For the first few years she had faced the struggle humorously, courageously: it was a sprightly attitude towards life, almost flirtatious, as a woman flirts lightly with a man who means nothing to her. As the house grew shabby, and the furniture, and her clothes could not be replaced; when she looked into the mirror and saw her drying, untidy hair and roughening face, she would give a quick high laugh and say, “Dear me, the things one comes to!” She was facing this poverty as she would have faced, in England, poverty of a narrowing, but socially accepted kind. What she could not face was a different kind of fear; and Major Carruthers understood that too well, for it was now his own fear.

  The two children were pale, fine-drawn creatures, almost transparent-looking in their thin nervous fairness, with the defensive and wary manners of the young who have been brought up to expect a better way of life than they enjoy. Their anxious solicitude wore on Major Carruthers’ already over-sensitised nerves. Children had no right to feel the aching pity which showed on their faces whenever they looked at him. They were too polite, too careful, too scrupulous. When they went into their mother’s room she grieved sorrowfully over them, and they submitted patiently to her emotion. All those weeks of the school holidays after she was taken ill, they moved about the farm like two strained and anxious ghosts, and whenever he saw them his sense of guilt throbbed like a wound. He was glad they were going back to school soon, for then—so he thought—it would be easier to manage. It was an intolerable strain, running the farm and coming back to the neglected house and the problems of food and clothing, and a sick wife who would not get better until he could offer her hope.

  But when they had gone back, he found that after all, things were not much easier. He slept little, for his wife needed attention in the night; and he became afraid for his own health, worrying over what he ate and wore. He learnt to treat himself as if his health was not what he was, what made him, but something apart, a commodity like efficiency, which could be estimated in terms of money at the end of a season. His health stood between them and complete ruin; and soon there were medicine bottles beside his bed as well as beside his wife’s.

  One day, while he was carefully measuring out tonics for himself in the bedroom, he glanced up and saw his wife’s small reddened eyes staring incredulously but ironically at him over the bedclothes. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I need a tonic,” he explained awkwardly, afraid to worry her by explanations.

  She laughed, for the first time in weeks; then the slack tears began welling under the lids, and she turned to the wall again.

  He understood that some vision of himself had been destroyed, finally, for her. Now she was left with an ageing, rather fussy gentleman, carefully measuring medicine after meals. But he did not blame her; he never had blamed her; not even though he knew her illness was a failure of will. He patted her cheek uncomfortably, and said: “It wouldn’t do for me to get run down, would it?” Then he adjusted the curtains over the windows to shut out a streak of dancing light that threatened to fall over her face, set a glass nearer to her hand, and went out to arrange for her tray of slops to be carried in.

  Then he took, in one swift, painful movement, as if he were leaping over an obstacle, the decision he had known for weeks he must take sooner or later. With a straightening of his shoulders, an echo from his soldier past, he took on the strain of an extra burden: he must get an assistant, whether he liked it or not.

  So much did he shrink from any self-exposure, that he did not even consider advertising. He sent a note by native bearer to his neighbour, a few miles off, asking that it should be spread abroad that he was wanting help. He knew he would not have to wait long. It was 1931, in the middle of a slump, and there was unemployment, which was a rare thing for this new, sparsely-populated country.

  He wrote the following to his two sons at boarding-school:

  I expect you will be surprised to hear I’m getting another man on the place. Things are getting a bit too much, and as I plan to plant a bigger acreage of maize this year, I thought it would need two of us. Your mother is better this week, on the whole, so I think things are looking up. She is looking forward to your next holidays, and asks me to say she will write soon. Between you and me, I don’t think she’s up to writing at the moment. It will soon be getting cold, I think, so if you need any clothes, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do . . .

  A week later, he sat on the little verandah, towards evening, smoking, when he saw a man coming through the trees on a bicycle. He watched him closely, already trying to form an estimate of his character by the tests he had used all his life: the width between the eyes, the shape of the skull, the way the legs were set on to the body. Although he had been taken in a dozen times, his belief in these methods never wavered. He was an easy prey for any trickster, lending money he never saw again, taken in by professional adventurers who (it seemed to him, measuring others by his own decency and the quick warmth he felt towards people) were the essence of gentlemen. He used to say that being a gentleman was a question of instinct: one could not mistake a gentleman.

  As the visitor stepped off his bicycle and wheeled it to the verandah, Major Carruthers saw he was young, thirty perhaps, sturdily built, with enormous strength in the thick arms and shoulders. His skin was burnt a healthy orange-brown colour. His close hair, smooth as the fur of an animal, reflected no light. His obtuse, generous features were set in a round face, and the eyes were pale grey, nearly colourless.

  Major Carruthers instinctively dropped his standards of value as he looked, for this man was an Afrikaner, and thus came into an outside category. It was not that he disliked him for it, although his father had been killed in the Boer War, but he had never had anything to do with the Afrikaans people before, and his knowledge of them was hearsay, from Englishmen who had the old prejudice. But he liked the look of the man: he liked the honest and straightforward face.

  As for Van Heerden, he immediately recognised his traditional enemy, and his inherited dislike was strong. For a moment he appeared obstinate and wary. But they needed each other too badly to nurse old hatreds, and Van Heerden sat down when he was asked, though awkwardly, suppressing reluctance, and began drawing patterns in the dust with a piece of straw he had held between his lips.

  Major Carruthers did not need to wonder about the man’s circumstan
ces: his quick acceptance of what were poor terms spoke of a long search for work.

  He said scrupulously: “I know the salary is low and the living quarters are bad, even for a single man. I’ve had a patch of bad luck, and I can’t afford more. I’ll quite understand if you refuse.”

  “What are the living quarters?” asked Van Heerden. His was the rough voice of the uneducated Afrikaner: because he was uncertain where the accent should fall in each sentence, his speech had a wavering, halting sound, though his look and manner were direct enough.

  Major Carruthers pointed ahead of them. Before the house the bush sloped gently down to the fields. “At the foot of the hill there’s a hut I’ve been using as a storehouse. It’s quite well-built. You can put up a place for a kitchen.”

  Van Heerden rose. “Can I see it?”

  They set off. It was not far away. The thatched hut stood in uncleared bush. Grass grew to the walls and reached up to meet the slanting thatch. Trees mingled their branches overhead. It was round, built of poles and mud and with a stamped dung floor. Inside there was a stale musty smell because of the ants and beetles that had been at the sacks of grain. The one window was boarded over, and it was quite dark. In the confusing shafts of light from the door, a thick sheet of felted spider web showed itself, like a curtain halving the interior, as full of small flies and insects as a butcherbird’s cache. The spider crouched, vast and glittering, shaking gently, glaring at them with small red eyes, from the centre of the web. Van Heerden did what Major Carruthers would have died rather than do: he tore the web across with his bare hands, crushed the spider between his fingers, and brushed them lightly against the walls to free them from the clinging silky strands and the sticky mush of insect-body.

  “It will do fine,” he announced.

  He would not accept the invitation to a meal, thus making it clear this was merely a business arrangement. But he asked, politely (hating that he had to beg a favour), for a month’s salary in advance. Then he set off on his bicycle to the store, ten miles off, to buy what he needed for his living.