A Blade of Grass

by Lewis Desoto

  Once, when the telephone rang and rang, Tembi went through from the kitchen to answer it and found Märit standing in the corridor looking down at the instrument. When Tembi reached for it, Märit shook her head. Now when the telephone rings nobody answers its call.

  The farm has a life of its own, as if it does not need this sad woman who drifts along its edges, and life progresses with the momentum that was in place before the Baas died. Under Joshua’s supervision the crops are tended, the cattle are herded to pasture, the milking is done, the maintenance and repairs are carried out. But he keeps a worried eye on the house, and he sees the woman sitting there on the veranda for long hours, the woman who does not acknowledge him when he approaches and doffs his hat and says, “Missus?”

  Joshua arrives at the kitchen door and calls Tembi out and asks her what the Missus thinks, what she says. But Tembi can only shrug. “She is sad in her heart” is all she can say. Joshua takes off his hat and slaps it against his thigh with irritation and glares at the house before striding off across to the kraal.

  Märit remains shut off with her memories. She remembers when they came to tell her that her parents were dead. A boating accident on Hartbeespoort Dam, where they had gone for the day because her father wanted to fish, and he had tried to convince Märit to come along, and she had said no, because she wanted to spend the day with Ben. He had dropped her at the house just after sunset, and her parents were not home yet. Then, less than an hour later, the knocking at the door. A police officer standing on the steps, a frightening sight, making her heart race because she knew it could only be bad news. When he took off his hat she knew it was something terrible. Then the mumbled words, apologetic, as if it were somehow his fault. She remembers the policeman standing in the Sunday dusk, how he could not meet her eyes, how she had sensed that he wanted nothing more than to blurt out the news and flee.

  She had feared that it was Ben, that something had happened to him on his way back to his apartment in Hillbrow. She had felt relief and shock in the same moment. And perhaps it was that sense of relief that made her turn to Ben so entirely in the weeks after her parents’ death. It was with relief that she said yes when he asked her to marry him. It was with relief that she allowed herself to be swept up in his plans to buy a farm, to become a farmer. She was without direction, without a home, and Ben steered her towards what was lacking in her life.

  But now it is Ben who is dead.

  In this time of Märit’s mourning and her remembering, Connie van Staden visits the house. Tembi brings tea and cake on a tray to the veranda where Connie sits talking to the silent Märit. And when the tea and the cake are finished Connie walks into the kitchen and looks into the pantry and opens the cupboards and shakes her head. After that, she speaks to Märit again, almost scolding, as one would speak to a sulking child, then she puts Märit into her car and they drive away from the farm.

  In Klipspring, Connie takes Märit to the office of the advokaat, where there are legal papers to review and sign. The lawyer informs Märit that the farm is hers now, debt free. If she wishes to sell, he will be glad to assist her. Connie frowns at him when he says this and he mumbles an apology. Then Connie takes Märit to the shops, and Märit walks behind her, silent, clutching the folder of legal papers in her hand. She lets Connie choose the supplies of food, the toiletries, acquiescing to every choice Connie makes.

  When the trunk and the back seat of the car are loaded, Connie takes Märit by the arm and leads her up Kerkstraat, to the church, to the small graveyard, where the new granite headstone is bright in the sun. Märit stands there only a moment, shading her eyes, imagining the shattered remains of her husband’s body enclosed in the pine coffin beneath the ground, before she turns to Connie and says, “I want to go back to the farm now.”

  Later, when she sits alone on the veranda and watches the outlines of the distant hills soften under misty clouds, and smells the wood smoke from the cooking fires in the kraal, and hears the cooing of the doves in the eucalyptus trees as they settle down for the night, she realizes that this is what her life is now. This farm. Now she is truly alone. An orphan and a widow.

  29

  MÄRIT WAKES to the chirrup of a cricket, close by, perhaps in the thatch of the roof. Chirrup, chirrup. Then a pause, then the sound repeated. She listens to the beat of the two notes, to the little echo that lingers in the moment of silence between the beats, like a waiting. How persistent it is, she thinks, always calling like that, solitary but determined with its hope and its will, this small voice.

  Rain has been falling in the night but has ceased in the early hours of the dawn, leaving the earth wet and new as the sun rises. A mist hangs over the fields for an hour or two, then burns off and the earth is new again.

  Märit wakes with the acute sense that a veil has lifted from her eyes and a weight from her body. When she rises from the bed and stands at the window the light has a clarity that was not there before. Everything is clear and defined, without illusion—everything is only what it is, nothing more, nothing less. She realizes what accounts for the difference between today and yesterday—fear has left her.

  The nutty aroma of coffee is coming from the direction of the kitchen, and there is a pot on the stove when Märit enters, but Tembi is not there. Märit calls her name once, then pours herself some of the coffee, and from a tin in the pantry takes a couple of boerebiskuit. She carries her breakfast back to the bedroom and sits down on the stool in front of the dressing table.

  Her reflection confronts her: hair in disarray, face still wrinkled and soft from sleep, but with something else in the features that was not there before. Märit sees herself, revealed with the same clarity that illuminates the landscape.

  She lifts her chin, almost in defiance, and runs her hands through her tangled hair. Is that me? she wonders, lifting the thick weight of the reddish brown hair, the weight that is always upon her shoulders. A weight made up of all the years of shampooing, and combing, and arranging, ever since she was a child. So that she would look nice, so that she would be presentable, so that she would be attractive. And her mother always saying those words, always noticing Märit’s hair, making sure she was presentable, attractive. Sometimes it had seemed that Märit’s hair belonged more to her mother than herself. Once, when Märit grew tired of her hair and wanted to cut it, her mother said to her, “You have a plainness in your face—you need to accentuate your features. Without your hair you will look ordinary. You need it to look nice.”

  People did admire her hair, and the other girls at school were envious, and when she started working and went into the city to her job, men often looked at her. And she always made sure she looked nice, as her mother wanted her to be.

  But what a burden and pretense it is, Märit thinks, as she sits at the dresser surrounded by her perfumes and creams and mascara and lipstick—all the accoutrements necessary to make one’s self look nice. All of this is a shell, a mask that allows her to be in the world, to be like everyone else. A mask to hide the woman within, until she disappears beneath the weight of her own appearance and wears only her own vanity.

  The sight of her reflection does not please Märit. What she sees in the mirror seems false, a disguise. Yesterday’s woman.

  A sparkle of light bounces from the mirror, a gleam from the wedding ring on her finger. Märit looks at the gold band curiously, then works it loose over her knuckle, surprised at how easily it comes off. She remembers the moment this ring was placed on her finger, where it has remained until this moment. What import it carried then, yet how little it weighs now. She opens the dressing table drawer and drops the ring amongst the other bits of jewelry that lie there. And now everybody will look at her and know that she is a woman alone.

  “A widow I will be,” she says, then gives an involuntary shudder at the words, as if they are a betrayal of Ben and almost a curse upon herself.

  Her reflection looks back at her—timid, but determined.

  Rising from the st
ool Märit walks to the kitchen, rummages around in the cutlery drawer until she finds what she wants, then comes back to confront her image—this time with a pair of scissors in her hand.

  Her hair is heavy as she tilts her head, grasping a thick handful, and the shears are heavy in her hand as she brings them forward and slices through the long hair. The bite of the blades sends a tremor through her whole body.

  So easy. She tilts her head in the opposite direction and feels again the satisfying motion of the shears biting into the thick hair. So easy.

  She bends her head forward so that she can reach the back, laying the shears close to her scalp, and severs another thick plait of hair. Then with quick motions she chops at her hair, and the clumps fall on her shoulders and on her lap and on the dresser amongst the glittering bottles and jars.

  With a strange fascination and her heart racing at the boldness of what she is doing, she watches herself in the mirror as the blades slice through the coils and strands with a satisfying crunch that resonates all the way through her body. On the dresser and on the floor and littering her lap, the hair shines in the clear light.

  A different face seems to emerge as the hair falls away from her head, a strange face, plain yes, smaller somehow, naked. A face she does not know, but a face that she recognizes as her own.

  At last she ceases, for now there is only an uneven stubble across her skull, and she sits looking at the new face with her heart still racing, with her hair in untidy heaps all around her—the debris of the past.

  Her hands touch the stubble, reminding her of the feel of Tembi’s hair and of the new growth in the fields after the rains and after the plowing.

  “Me,” she says, to the mirror—to herself.

  Märit bathes, washing the past from her skin, marveling at the feel of the stubble on her head as she rubs shampoo into her scalp. Drying herself, she stands in front of the long mirror in the bedroom with a mixture of anxiety—for what has she done so rashly?—and yet a feeling of triumph.

  She sees herself—naked and unadorned, nothing more than herself. She smiles at the transformation, at her bravery.

  Märit begins to search through her closet for something to wear, something that is appropriate to her new self. All her clothes are from another time, suitable only for a different person.

  A patch of bright green on a top shelf catches her eye, on the shelf where those items that will never be worn more than once are folded away. She shakes out a length of cloth, a sarong-like garment, bright with red and green and black and yellow, all mixed in a pattern of leaf shapes. She remembers buying this in the Indian market in Durban, on her honeymoon.

  The colors had seemed appropriate to the hot winds and the smell of the salt sea in the air and the spicy cooking smells from the food stalls. She had worn the sarong on the beach, with a wide straw hat, and felt herself to be something exotic.

  But when she came here, to the farm, where the colors were tan and ochre, and gray-green in the trees, the brightness of her sarong was only garish, unnatural—and how could any respectable farmer’s wife wear such a garment? Only the women in the fields wore clothes like this, and the women walking in the dust at the sides of the roads with baskets balanced on their heads and babies bundled on their backs. Only the “Africans” wore such garments.

  Märit shakes out the folded cloth and wraps it around her midriff twice and up across her chest and ties two ends together in a firm knot. Her shoulders and her back are bare, like those of the women who work in the fields.

  She runs her fingers across the stubble of her hair, not much longer now than Tembi’s. A pang of melancholy falls over her as she remembers the loneliness of her childhood, her longing to have a companion, a sister whom she could confide in, and stand with in front of the mirror like this, marveling at the changes that came with growing up. Always in her girlhood there had been that sense of absence, the long hours alone, waiting for something or someone. Perhaps that is why she married so quickly, so willingly.

  She is dressed now. She will not bother with shoes. She will go barefoot, like Tembi, like the women who walk barefoot along the sides of the road in the dust. And now she turns her back on the mirror, for she will not gaze anymore upon her reflection. She will see herself only in the eyes that look upon her, and if by chance she glimpses her reflection in a window, or in a limpid pool in the rocks, or in a fragment of mirror, she will know herself, unadorned.

  The heap of shorn hair lies on the floor near the dresser, like a shed skin, never to be worn again. Märit sweeps up the strands with a dustpan and gathers the clumps into the wastebasket. In the kitchen she lifts the lid on the stove and is about to tip the hair into the fire—a final gesture—when she thinks better of it, not wanting the house to fill with the odor of burning hair. Better to burn it outside in the braai pit.

  Outside, underneath the wire grill on the barbecue, there is dry kindling ready, arranged into a neat pile with a few twists of old newspaper. She remembers the time Ben used this braai, when he invited the neighbors for a barbecue not long after he took possession of the farm. The men stood out here with their cans of Castle lager amidst the smoke and smell of grilling boerewors and sosaties and thick mutton chops. The women gathered in the kitchen, preparing potato salad and chutney. They were curious about her and asked many questions, and Märit was shy among them. Those same women will really talk about her now, she knows.

  Let them talk, Märit thinks as she strikes a match and touches it to a twist of newspaper. A thin stream of white smoke issues from the kindling, and she bends to blow at the glowing wood until the small flame expands with a crackling sound and the fire leaps alive.

  Märit half expects Ben to appear from the kitchen carrying a plate of steaks and offer to help her, as if they were about to start dinner on the grill. She would then fetch him a glass of beer, and stand next to him as the meat sizzled and smoked, and he would put his arm around her and tell her how happy he was to be standing here, on this spot, doing this very thing.

  But he won’t appear. Never again. Märit purses her lips and blows fiercely at the flames, and she tells herself that the stinging in her eyes is from the smoke and not from her tears.

  The heat is quick and sudden as the dry wood catches, and she steps back as the flames grow. Then she reaches for the wastebasket and takes out a handful of hair. The soft coils are sleek and smooth in her fingers as she holds them folded in her palm a moment—a brief moment of regret—before she tosses the hair into the flames. The quick crackle and hiss sends an acrid smell into the air, a singed smell that makes her crinkle her nostrils.

  Now she lifts the basket and shakes all the remaining hair into the fire, and the smoke is thick as the flames burn the hair black, and the smoke stings her eyes, but she welcomes it, for it burns away the old Märit.

  The hair burns rapidly, crackling, the way fire does when it moves across the pastureland in the winter when the farmers burn off the old growth.

  As the smoke subsides, and the acrid singed smell is replaced by the clean wood-smoke smell, as the last evidence of her long chestnut hair is carried up into the blue sky as faint ashes, as Märit turns away from the flames, Tembi appears.

  Tembi’s eyes go wide at the sight of this stranger here, and her glance flickers to the fire and back, and then her mouth falls open in recognition.

  “Hauh!” she exclaims softly. “Märit, it is you!”

  Märit smiles. She sees herself now not in a mirror, but reflected in the face of another.

  “I do not know you,” Tembi says. “You have changed yourself!” Tembi steps closer, shaking her head in wonderment. “Your hair, your clothes, everything is different.” She reaches up a hand and lightly touches Märit’s head. “Your hair, it’s short like mine now.”

  “Is it all right?” Märit says, suddenly doubtful. “Do I look strange? Am I ugly?”

  Tembi shakes her head. “So different. But the same. Not ugly, no.”

  “We will be
the same now,” Märit says. “Like sisters.”

  Tembi nods her head, her smile changing to a more solemn expression. “You have done this to become new.”

  “Yes. We are going to live a new kind of life. Both of us. This farm will be ours, and we will make it work. I don’t know much about farming but I will try. And you will help me. If you want to, that is.”

  “Yes, I can help you,” Tembi answers. She knows that her destiny has changed, and that it lies here now. “I don’t think it can be so hard to look after cattle and grow things.”

  “Together we can learn what we don’t know.”

  “Come,” Märit says, linking her arm with Tembi’s, turning her back on the dwindling flames.

  30

  A FEW DAYS LATER Märit asks Tembi to relay a message to Joshua, who relays it to the rest of the workers, who leave their tasks and come to the sorting shed, which is only a cement floor sheltered by a corrugated tin roof supported by wooden posts. They gather here, squatting on the floor, for there are no chairs or benches, and the small children run amongst the adults, and Joshua stands to one side with his arms folded.

  When Tembi arrives to tell Märit that the workers are waiting, Märit, suddenly nervous, says, “What should I say to them?”

  “What you said to me. That this is your farm now. That you will run it.”

  “Will they believe I can do it? I don’t know if I believe it myself. Really, I don’t know much about farming. Ben did everything. All I did was the accounts.”