by Lewis Desoto
Connie rises and touches Märit’s shoulder. “We will take you to him, child. Come now,” she says softly, holding out her arms, “we will take you to him.”
24
IN KLIPSPRING, a town of tidy gardens and small houses on quiet streets, there is a church on Wolmarans Street, a plain white church with a black spire, surrounded by neat lawns behind a wrought-iron fence. It is to this church, to the small graveyard behind the church, that Märit has allowed them to bring Ben.
She has allowed them to bring him here because she is numb, lethargic, moving with the great weariness upon her. Ben should be buried on the farm, but Connie van Staden tells her this is for the best, and Predikant Venter tells her this is for the best, that Ben should be buried here in hallowed ground, amongst his own kind, and not on the farm.
She has allowed them to bring him here, rather than to the farm, because she is weary, and cannot see beyond the requirements of each moment, each daily task of washing herself, and dressing, and sitting in the car, and stepping from it onto the grounds of this church. She cannot see the future.
The sun is a hard yellow disk in the sky and the clods of earth next to the grave turn gray and dusty in the heat, and the people gathered around the grave give off a smell of perspiration and perfume that is turning stale.
Märit stands silent in her dark clothes and her veil. Her thick chestnut hair is drawn into a tight bun on her neck, so tight that it pinches and pulls the skin of her scalp. In the hard sunlight the face of Predikant Venter is sallow, and the farmers and their wives shift uncomfortably in their formal dark clothes. Perspiration trickles under heavy cloth, on the pale flesh hidden under heavy cloth. The words drone from the lips of the Predikant, the way they drone when he speaks in church on Sundays.
Now is the time of burial. Märit does not weep. Weeping will come later. All she knows now is that she has crossed a river, and everything that she once called her life has been left behind on the other side. That place will now be called the past. And what happens from now on will be called her life. There is a before and an after. Everything will be different now.
In the hard sky a hawk drifts on the current, up there where the air is cool. And somewhere unseen beyond the neat town, the drone of a tractor is faintly audible. And here a body is placed in the earth, and covered up, and everything will be different after this.
The dry soil falls upon the coffin and Märit looks away. It is unbearable to think of his body in there—not even a body, just mangled flesh.
Märit does not weep. But as the clods of earth thud onto the coffin in its cavity in the earth she wants to step forward and say, No, not here, he would have wanted to lie in the earth on the farm, on his own land. It was all he wanted, to have his own land.
AFTERWARDS, when the procession of cars carrying neighbors and acquaintances has driven out to the farm, throwing the columns of dust into the air, and the women have set out food and made coffee, and the Predikant has said his platitudes, and Connie has hovered around Märit like a mother hen—after all this, Märit can only wait for them to be gone from her house.
But the women watch her, to know how she is affected, how she is bearing up. Because what if it happened to them? It could have been one of us, they think. What will happen to us? We can’t hold out like this forever. There are those who wait just across the border, and in our own towns and cities, in our own houses. They will not go away, there are too many of them, a whole continent just waiting to fall upon us, to drive us out of our country. But where can we go?
The women look at Märit and wonder why she does not weep, why she does not show her grief. The generous amongst them tell themselves that she is in shock, poor thing, and the ungenerous think to themselves that she does not weep because she is cold, or she did not love him, she is a cold one, never quite friendly, never making an effort to fit in. Not one of us.
They want her to weep, for their own fear. And they ask themselves what she will do now. She cannot manage the farm on her own, a frail thing like her, not on her own. She will have to sell. She will leave them and go back to the city.
Märit waits for them to be gone. She does not want to share her loss and her grief with these strangers. She does not want to eat their home-baked cakes and drink the coffee they have made, or listen to their voices, to their regrets and their condolences, or to feel the eyes of the women upon her, or to see the somber men plotting revenge.
The men stand on the veranda, in their dark suits that are only worn for church, for weddings and funerals, smoking their pipes, passing around a surreptitious flask of brandy, and their eyes move casually across the fields and the orchards and the cattle in the distant field. How much will the farm bring on the market, they wonder, and they do calculations in their heads, comparing the worth of this farm with the worth of their own land. But now is not a good time for buying and selling, not now.
The men mutter amongst themselves, quietly, so that the women may not hear. What is the government doing? they ask. This death has been a death of one of their own. For them, Ben was one of their own. What are the police doing about these terrorists who come across the border like thieves and burn the farms? Where is the army? Somebody has to put a stop to it—if not the government, then they will do it themselves, for they are an independent and hardy people, like their Boer ancestors, ready to fight for the land. We have made this land and we will not be moved, they say. The young van Staden son wants to saddle up his horse and ride to the kraal this very moment. We will take care of it, he says. The guns must come out now.
On the farm there is no work being done this day. In the kraal there are low voices and careful movements. The children are scolded if they laugh too loud, and they fall silent under the worried frowns of their elders. In the kraal the people wait, for everything can change now.
DUSK ARRIVES at last, and with it silence. The doves fall silent. The long shadows from the eucalyptus trees creep across the lawn and across the rose garden, the long shadows stretch across the veldt as the sun fades and weakens. The long shadows cloak the house, the empty house where Märit sits waiting for darkness.
She drinks from a tumbler of gin and lime cordial, the bottles on the table next to her with her cigarettes and lighter. She sits waiting for darkness in her funeral dress.
I am a widow now, she tells herself. But was I ever really a wife? I wanted to be. That was the state which Ben found me in—waiting. Waiting to be a wife. Because I wanted to get away from home, and from my dreary job, and from the sameness of my life. I wanted life to begin, real life. And I thought that when I found a man, when a man found me, my life would start, my real life.
My mother liked him, she liked his manners, he was charming to her. She liked Ben because he was gentlemanly, he held doors open for women and stood when they came into a room. Sometimes he brought her flowers. But Mother had her doubts, not about him, but about me, about me living up here. She told me I wasn’t suited to be a farmer’s wife. She had her doubts about me, and when I disagreed, she said that she knew me, knew the deeper side of me that I didn’t even know myself yet. I came here for Ben, because of Ben, because I was married and thought it would be a good life and that I could do it.
Märit stretches out her arm and reaches for her glass of gin, feeling the slackness in her body. The white walls of the room have faded to gray, the outlines of the furniture are blurred, the landscape beyond the windows has receded under a cloak of darkness as night falls. Near the river the croaking of frogs begins. A cricket chirps outside the window. The distant pulse of the generator beats.
I have walked upright today, Märit thinks. I have held my head up when I wanted to fall upon the ground. I did not weep. Once I was a married woman and now I am a widow because my husband is dead. Now I am without family, without children, without friends. Now I am alone.
Dusk becomes evening, and evening turns to night. The only light is the glow of her cigarette and the periodic flash of the lighter. The g
lass of gin is steadily emptied, and replenished.
It matters little now if I smoke too much and drink too much. What does it matter now? Who is there to care?
I came here for Ben, because I thought I loved him, but I don’t know if I loved him. I decided I wanted to get married and I did. And Ben wanted me. He wanted a wife. But did he love me? We made love, but was it love? He liked it, liked me. And I enjoyed being enjoyed. He was different in bed, not so well-mannered. Hungry. Like me. We were different in bed, two other people, or maybe we were our real selves. There was something desperate in our lovemaking, some desperation to meet each other that made it so intense, because in the daylight we did not really meet, and we both sensed it, and we were afraid to know that.
Märit reaches for her cigarettes and finds the package empty. She rises to her feet, stumbling against the side of the couch, unsteady, her head spinning. On her way to the kitchen through the dark house she bumps into the walls; her body seems not to belong to her, to be some clumsy object attached to her self.
In the kitchen she turns on a single lamp and finds the carton of cigarettes and fumbles one out of the package. The taste in her mouth is sour when she lights it, and she tosses the cigarette into the sink. She is hungry. From the shelf she takes down a can of baked beans, then spends a long minute scrabbling in the drawer for an opener.
Standing at the counter she reaches into the can and digs out the saucecovered beans with her fingers, stuffing them into her mouth, ravenous, swallowing, barely chewing the sticky mass.
Her fingers taste of tobacco, and the wetness across her lips makes her think of Ben’s hands. She remembers his hands vividly. A man’s hands can arouse tenderness, or revulsion. They always seem so naked, so intimate. Unlike the face, which can be a mask. But the hands are just hands and they cannot be disguised. A man’s hands reveal who he is.
Ben’s hands were sure, confident. Quite soft at first, but when he started farming, the skin on his palms toughened, but they were soft still, like the fine leather of kid gloves. And there were always little nicks and scrapes on his fingers, cuts from a tool or a piece of wire or just a scrape against a stone—the marks of his life on the land. His hands changed as he changed.
Yet his hands always remained gentle, and sure, and gave me pleasure.
She draws her hand across her mouth and licks the sauce from her fingers. That time when he put his hand between my legs and drew it across my mouth and kissed my own wetness from my lips. She licks her fingers and stuffs them into her mouth. When he put his mouth on me, and kissed me between my legs, and then kissed me on my mouth. I wanted that. I liked it when he did that, but I was too shy to ask him, to say the words.
And that last morning, when I did ask him, and he was in too much of a hurry to get to town, too eager to get the seedlings for the almond trees that he thought he would see grow on his land. And then he never came back.
Märit slumps against the counter. She lets the can of beans fall to the floor and raises her dress, sliding her hand down the front of her underwear, like her husband had done, clutching at her own flesh the way he had clutched at her.
She presses deeper, clenching on her fingers, wanting the strangeness of it to fill her, to make her remember, to make her forget.
She crumples to the floor, curling into herself, a cry of distress escaping from her throat.
25
THE HOUSE STANDS SILENT through the afternoon and into the night. Long after darkness has fallen a single light flicks on in the kitchen, but no movement is visible. The house stands silent, as if abandoned.
In the kraal, across that unbridgeable distance that separates house and huts, there is a different kind of silence—the low murmurs of gloom, of worry, of fear for the future.
The matter of the death of Baas Ben is the only topic of conversation. This death, and the manner of its coming and its meaning for the future, is being discussed all across the district, in the farms and the town, in the hotel and in the houses, and especially here in the kraal on the farm called Kudufontein.
There has been no work on the farm this day. Joshua, the headman, has known without being instructed that there must be no work today. Those who look to the single light burning in the kitchen window of the house have tribulation in their hearts. What will become of the farm, of their work, of their lives? Everything can change now.
They have watched the coming and going of the cars, have heard the voices talking, have seen the men standing on the veranda. And when Joshua walked to the house, hat in hand, to offer the condolences of those who live and work on this land, the men turned hard faces to him and sent him away.
Nobody stirs from the kraal. The cattle go untended, the soil is not tilled, the crops are not watered. When the cars have gone, and the women in their Sunday dresses, and the men in their dark suits, and the Predikant, tall in his black hat, only then does something of the weight lift from the kraal.
Shadows lengthen, twilight falls, night and gloom descend. In the kraal they light fires and cook the evening meal and talk in low voices. And they watch and listen for a sign from the house.
Where is the Missus? they ask. Why is there not wailing and lamentations? Does she sit in the darkness, alone with the spirit of her dead husband?
Tembi watches too, and wonders. Joshua, the headman, says to Tembi, “You must go there, up to the house. You must see what she is doing.”
“I cannot.” Tembi shakes her head. He does not know why she cannot, and she will never tell him, but she cannot go to Märit. Even though Märit has lost her husband, Tembi cannot go to her, because her face still burns with shame where she has been slapped, and her heart is hard against Märit.
“You must go to her,” Joshua insists. “You must tell her that we are sorry for Baas Ben, and you must tell her that we are sorry for her. And you must ask her what will become of the farm.”
Like the white farmers and their wives, he too doubts that Märit can run the farm now. He too knows that she is weak, alone, without a man. Without a man, a woman like her cannot run a farm.
“You must go to her,” Joshua says. “Is not your work in the house? You must cook for her and not let her sit alone in the darkness.”
Tembi shakes her head. “No, I will not go there.”
“Yes,” Joshua says, and then a sly look shows in his eyes, and he speaks louder, so that the others around the fire pit may hear as well. “Doesn’t she favor you, doesn’t she take you away from your place with the other young women and make you her favorite? Your life is easy in that house, your work is nothing compared to ours. This is so. She favors you, and you must go to her now and tell her we are sorry for the Baas and you must ask her what she will do with this farm.”
Again Tembi shakes her head. “No, I cannot go there. She does not favor me.”
“She favors you. Did she not send you a gift? Did she not send you a blue bracelet with that little child? She favors you.”
“No,” Tembi says.
Losing patience, Joshua grasps Tembi by the arm and pulls her away from the fire. He pushes her away from the circle of light. “Do what I tell you. Go there! Go and talk to her.”
Because Tembi has no mother and no father to say otherwise against the authority of Joshua, she leaves the kraal and walks into the darkness where the night crickets sing. She stops some distance from the house and looks at the square of light that burns in the window. She stands between the kraal and the house, alone in the night, belonging to neither the house nor the kraal. Tilting her head she looks up to the stars, so many of them crowded together, like houses, each burning its own lamp in the darkness. Tembi has heard people say that when a person dies her soul becomes a star in the heavens. Perhaps that is why there are so many. Is her mother, Grace, there too, holding a candle of light against the darkness? Is Baas Ben there too now? Or do they only lie in the deep soil, without light forever?
I cannot go to the house, she thinks, as she looks again at the single
illuminated window. Märit has banished me. She has struck my face and banished me, so that I had to skulk through the trees to my hut, shamed and naked, creeping like a jackal.
Yet I cannot go to the kraal either, for they have sent me out into the night. Where can I go? There is only my garden, hidden behind the thorns and the rocks, but I cannot go there either. How can I sleep where the wild animals hunt at night?
She thinks of Märit alone in the house, alone in grief, and pity touches her heart. She knows what it is to be alone in grief and have to sit with the knowledge of death. She thinks, If Märit would appear at the window now, and see me, and forgive me, and beckon me to come to the house, then I would go.
Tembi looks at the stars, sparkling with blue light, and she remembers the bracelet that Märit sent, that is now tucked away into a little box in her hut with her few precious things. Pity is in her heart, and forgiveness, so she walks forward along the path and ascends the back steps and presses her ear softly to the door, holding her breath.
She turns the handle, swings the door open, puts her head in, and whispers, softly, afraid to break the silence. “Missus? Märit? It’s Tembi.”
No answer comes and she swings the door wider, stepping into the house, because this is the only place she can go on this dark night. The dim bulb burns in the ceiling, casting a yellowish light on the table and counter. The rest of the house is dark and silent. Tembi steps forward, then looks down and screams.
Märit’s body is slumped across the floor by the sink, her dress pulled up to her waist, a smear of red across her mouth and across the pale skin of her thighs.
Tembi screams and falls against the door, then stumbles back into the night. Her first thought is that those who killed Baas Ben have come back and murdered Märit. She runs for the shelter of the trees and cowers in the darkness, too afraid to move, too afraid to run to the kraal and call for help. She cowers and stares at the lighted doorway.
