A Blade of Grass

by Lewis Desoto

  Märit goes through the house and lights all the paraffin lamps, and from the liquor cabinet she takes a bottle of gin, pouring herself a good measure. She sips the liquor, and for a moment she hears the music and the laughter and smells the scent of another world.

  WHEN TEMBI ENTERS the house she does so sheepishly. She wants to tell Märit what she has done about the name on the gate—to apologize, to explain.

  She finds the old Märit.

  The Märit that she expected to find has disappeared behind a barrier of clothes and lipstick and jewelry. She sees a woman from another world, the world that she has never entered. This is the Märit who is everything Tembi is not. Her gesture of painting a new name on the farm gate seems childish and puny now.

  Khoza enters behind Tembi, pausing to set the gun in a corner. He straightens up and gives a low whistle of appreciation.

  “Would anyone like a drink?” Märit says.

  Tembi looks upon Märit and her face burns with shame—for everything that she is not, and for what Märit has suddenly become. The betrayal is complete. She burns with shame at the betrayal. Angrily she pushes past Märit and runs to her room.

  Khoza looks Märit up and down, then leaves her alone in the room. She swallows her gin and pours a second one.

  There is a movement back and forth in the corridor, low whispers. Märit pointedly ignores the sounds. She pours a third drink.

  Then Tembi appears—but a Tembi that Märit has never seen before.

  A pale pink dress patterned with small flowers, earrings, necklace, high heels that she teeters on, handbag. Märit recognizes all of these, for they are her own. But the face is that of a stranger—powdered, lips bright with red lipstick. The dress is tight, cut low in the front to reveal the fullness of Tembi’s breasts. The effect is crude, almost a parody of herself. But the outcome is undeniable, radiating a raw sexuality; the clothes and makeup accentuating what is hidden.

  Tembi takes a glass from the table, fills it, and stands next to the fireplace, posing.

  Märit suddenly feels that it is she who is the parody, the grotesque. She feels old.

  She remembers the day she came into the house and found Tembi asleep in the bedroom, wearing the blue dress. And she remembers her sexual jealousy. Now it is complete. On that day Tembi seemed just a young girl dressing up, but now she has a new confidence, an awareness of her body that is obvious.

  Khoza saunters into the room, and his appearance is like a blow, for he has found Ben’s suit and one of his white shirts and has dressed in them.

  Märit staggers unsteadily to her feet. “How dare you! How dare you wear those clothes. Both of you! What right do you have?”

  “You don’t need them. You have so many things,” Tembi says, and glances at Khoza quickly for confirmation.

  “Don’t look to him. Those are not his clothes, this is not his house.”

  Khoza says, “You think you own everything, even us. But not anymore.”

  “Neither of you belongs in this house. You are here because of me. And what you are wearing belongs to me.”

  Tembi wavers, looking to Khoza for reassurance. “Before, when I came to this house, you wanted us to be the same. You wore clothes like mine. But now, if I wear your clothes, you don’t want that anymore.”

  “You forget your place, Tembi.”

  “It is not for you to tell me where my place is.”

  “He put you up to this, didn’t he?” Märit says.

  Khoza laughs.

  “Get out of here,” Märit says coldly. “Both of you. Get out of my house and off my farm.”

  Tembi turns on her and, to Märit’s great astonishment, says, “You get out!”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “If you don’t like us, then you can go.”

  “Yes,” Khoza says. “This is not your place anymore.”

  Before Märit can react, Khoza has grasped her by the arm and propelled her towards the door. He pulls it open and shoves her out. The door closes and the bolt rattles home behind her.

  Stunned, Märit stands on the threshold gasping. Her head spins. She turns and leans her face against the door, then suddenly pounds on it with both fists.

  “Open this door immediately! Tembi, do you hear me? I said, open this door!”

  She hears laughter from inside.

  Enraged, Märit marches around the side of the house to the kitchen entrance. She hears the key turn in the lock as she reaches the top of the stairs. Her fists beat on the door. “Get out of my house! Both of you! How dare you?”

  When she tries to peer in through the side window, rapping on the glass, the curtain is quickly drawn.

  “You devil!” Märit screams. She strides away from the house, fuming. Devil, devil, devil! Both of them. Devils! How dare they throw her out of her own house!

  She paces furiously back and forth along the driveway, kicking at the gravel. The house is pale in the dusk, the glow of the lamps yellow in the curtained windows. She imagines revenge—setting fire to the house, finding a gun and forcing them out, making them beg for her mercy.

  A chill wind blows around her. Night is coming; already the veldt is losing its color. Anger surges back—she will not let them keep her out in the coming night.

  Märit pounds on the door with both hands, hard, again and again. There is no answer. She walks all around the house, shaking the windows, finding each one locked and curtained. At her bedroom window, a chink of light shows between the curtains. “Tembi?” She taps lightly on the glass.

  Khoza’s face appears. “Voetsak!” he yells. The curtain is pulled shut.

  The word is like a slap in her face.

  She stumbles away from the window and her feet bump against a rock. Without a second thought Märit bends and lifts the rock in both hands, high above her head, and with all the force in her arms she hurls it at the bedroom window.

  The glass shatters with a tremendous bang, like a bomb exploding.

  In the silence that follows she shouts, “Go ahead, wear my clothes, sleep in my bed. I give you my permission. Go and fuck him on my bed, you little kaffir bitch!”

  No sound comes from the house. The curtain flutters across the broken glass. Then suddenly the barrel of the shotgun is thrust through the window. Märit screams as blue flame leaps from the gun, and the bang of the shot deafens her. She flings herself to the ground as the second barrel fires, pellets whining over her head like hail.

  She crawls away on all fours, very sober now, and truly terrified. Her skirt catches on something, rips. She yanks it loose, and then she is on her feet and running into the night.

  WHEN the night is fully dark, and only then, Märit crawls out from her hiding place in the trees and makes her way to the kraal, seeking refuge in one of the huts. By the faint flickering illumination of her cigarette lighter she finds a hut with a rough mattress and an old chest of drawers in the room—nothing else. She drags and pushes the chest in front of the door to make a barrier, then curls up on the mattress.

  Sometime in the night she wakes to hear the snuffling and snorting of an animal at the door of the hut, and she sits up, waiting for it to go away. She is not afraid. Not of animals. It is people she fears.

  IN THE SOBER HARSHNESS of morning, Märit rinses her face at the washhouse tap and swallows a mouthful of water. Carrying her shoes in her hand she follows the path back to the kitchen and tries the door. Still locked.

  She knocks, and after a moment Khoza appears in the doorway.

  “Are you looking for work?” he says.

  “No. I want a cup of tea. Not your games.”

  “If you want breakfast then you must work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Cleaning, cooking, washing. Meid’s work.”

  She tries to push past him into the house, but he bars her way with his arm.

  “Where is Tembi? I want to talk to her.”

  “Tembi doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Let h
er tell me that to my face. I want to see her.”

  Khoza shakes his head.

  “I won’t work for you. Why should I?”

  He slams the door in her face.

  Märit sits down on the upper step. Her skirt is torn along the hem, the thread unraveling. Absently she twines the strand of cotton around her finger, then snaps it off.

  “All right,” she mutters. She knocks on the door again.

  “All right, I’ll work,” she says when Khoza opens the door.

  The trace of a smile crosses his face. “Yes. And you can change your clothes as well. Put on your meid’s clothes.”

  Märit bows her head, penitent, and edges past him.

  She enters her house as a stranger.

  In the bedroom, glass litters the floor under the broken window. The curtain has been stuffed into the hole. The bed has not been slept in, she notices with relief.

  “You can clean up that glass too,” Khoza says from behind her.

  Märit closes the door, then finds her sarong, her beads, her bracelets. She puts a doek over her hair. Her soiled and torn suit she stuffs into the closet, along with her shoes and her jewelry. At the bathroom sink she washes the remnants of makeup from her face. When she is dressed again, the only incongruous element is the red varnish on her fingernails, a reminder of another self.

  With a few quick steps she crosses to Tembi’s room.

  As Märit enters, Tembi quickly pulls the sheet up to cover her face.

  “Tembi?”

  No answer, just the slight rise and fall of the sheet from Tembi’s breathing.

  “Look at me, Tembi. Is this what you want? For me to be your servant?”

  No reply.

  “This is what he wants. We both know it will be his farm if you let it happen.” The sound of Khoza in the kitchen prompts her to draw back. “I wonder how long he will let you live here,” Märit mutters from the doorway.

  She strides through to the front door and leaves the house. As she passes through the orchard she grabs an apricot from a branch and bites into it hungrily. She pulls down a few more and carries them with her to the river.

  White and brown and violet dappled light on the water, the whistling and chirping of the birds, the gurgle of the flow across the rocks. Patches of sunlight breaking through the leaves. Beauty that she does not see.

  She is tired of the struggle. She is hungry and she is thirsty and she is tired. She doesn’t care what happens to the farm, or who lives in the house. Better to let go, to give in, not to struggle and fight anymore.

  In the willow branches that hang low over the water, weaverbirds flit back and forth between the nests, which hang like little gourds of woven grass, suspended from the thinnest and most inaccessible of the slender boughs, each with its own round entrance by which the green birds come and go.

  Märit counts the nests—at least ten—a small community of families, busy living their lives high in the trees, unconcerned with her. Although they seem to squabble at each other constantly and defend their individual nests fiercely, the birds live in harmony. They make no war, they don’t banish their own kind. Why must we? Märit wonders.

  She remembers that Ben liked to watch the birds at their nest building. He wanted the farm to be like this—a small community, living in harmony. Why did it have to end?

  Becoming aware of the apricot in her hand Märit lifts it to her cheek and rubs the silky texture of the fruit skin against her own skin, inhaling the scent. The old half-conscious reverie descends over her as the tension lifts from her mind, lulled by the texture of the birdsong and the gurgling of the river flow—that old dreamy state of being outside herself, of being somewhere else.

  She bites into the apricot, crunching on the firm flesh, but it is sour on her tongue.

  As she stands to toss the unripe apricot into the river, Märit sees the men coming towards her through the trees.

  49

  THERE ARE THREE MEN, spread out in a loose line, cutting off any path of escape. Soldiers. She sees that immediately—the guns in their hands, the habitual manner in which they carry their weapons, the way they point them in her direction.

  The soldiers advance through the trees, camouflage tunics dappled olive and khaki in the light and shade that speckles through the leaves. Their path towards her is stealthy, intent—a tension suddenly vibrating through the air like electric current.

  Märit realizes that the birds have fallen silent. The half-eaten apricot drops from her fingers.

  Her dreaminess is now dread, for the soldiers have a weariness about them, their tunics are dusty and stained, their faces are gaunt and unshaven. They have the weariness of men who have fought for, and lost, something. Her dreaminess becomes dread, because the war has finally come to the farm.

  Those distant sounds sometimes heard far off, heard as a whispering across the sky, or the faint rumble of thunder on a cloudless day, those sounds she pretended not to hear, have finally come to the farm.

  It is not fear that Märit feels as she stands to face the soldiers, but dread at what was inevitable. Now she will have to look into the faces of these soldiers and know that war has come to the farm at last—not a plague of locusts or a broken generator or a faulty water pump, not a squabble about who will wear whose clothes, or who will cook and who will eat.

  The inevitable harm will come now to her, to Tembi, to Khoza, and to the farm. Even to the soldiers themselves. Märit knows this with a terrible certainty as the soldiers come for her. She sees it in their gaunt and weary faces. They bring harm. Despite themselves, they bring an end to something with their arrival.

  She turns, to the right, to the left, looking behind her where there is only the river. Some futile hope in her wants to stave off the future, and she turns towards the river, seeking a path along the shore beneath the willows.

  She has taken only a few steps before she comes face-to-face with a bearded man, so close that she can look into his eyes. A blur of camouflage, the soft cap, the glint of silver buckles, the dark sinister shape of the pistol in his hand, and the blue eyes peering into her own.

  He grabs her arm and pulls her towards him.

  “Mevrou!” he whispers. “Mevrou Laurens, be still!”

  Hearing her name like this, her old name that nobody has spoken in a long time, shocks her. Beneath the man’s beard and the dust on his face and the fatigue that has etched itself into the lines of his skin, Märit recognizes the blue eyes.

  “You!”

  “Gideon Schoon, Mevrou,” he says in a low voice.

  “Why are you here?”

  With a jerk of his head in the direction of the house he whispers, “Who else is up there?”

  “Tembi. My meid. And the houseboy.”

  “Anybody else?” His grip on her arm is hard, hurting her.

  “We are the only ones left on the farm. The others all left, a long time ago.” She does not know how long ago; the days have become months. “They all left, after the last time you were here.”

  His grip on her arm relaxes slightly but does not loosen. “You are hurting me,” she tells him.

  “Excuse me.” He steps away a couple of paces.

  The other three soldiers have spaced themselves out in a loose semicircle around her and Schoon, favoring the shadows, two of them facing outwards, the other watching her. Märit feels the tension emanating from the men, she smells it in their sweat as something metallic and acrid.

  “Has there been anybody here to this farm lately?” Schoon asks in a more normal tone.

  “Who?”

  “Any soldiers? Military personnel. Other visitors?”

  “No. There hasn’t been anybody.”

  “Good, good. Let’s go up to the house, shall we?” He says this casually, as if they are going for a stroll, but at the same time he makes a quick gesture to the soldiers. “Kruger, Malan, watch the back of the house. And careful, hey?”

  “Come,” Schoon says to Märit, speaking with some of his
old authority as the soldiers melt away through the orchard, but she sees the wariness in him, the anxiety. “Nobody up there but the meid and the houseboy, you said?”

  “Only them.”

  The remaining soldier walks just behind her and Schoon, his head moving to left and right, eyes scanning everything.

  In the back of Märit’s mind there is something new now, a relief. That they are white soldiers. On her side. And something else—a feeling that, if she were to analyze it, could only be characterized as a sense of righteous revenge. She will be reinstated in her house now. Khoza will be put in his place.

  Schoon mounts the veranda steps with her and stands to one side, away from the door. Märit hesitates, then, when he nods, tries the handle.

  The door is locked.

  Schoon frowns—not entirely trusting her, she sees.

  “It’s locked,” she says. “For safety.”

  “Knock,” he whispers.

  She does. Then again.

  After a moment from the other side of the door Khoza’s voice says, “What do you want?”

  “Khoza, it’s me.”

  “Go away.”

  “Open the door. We have some visitors.” She makes a gesture of apology to Schoon.

  “Take them to the kraal and entertain them there,” Khoza chuckles.

  Schoon leans in front of Märit and raps hard on the door.

  The bolt rattles open, the door swings wide; Khoza stands blocking the entrance with his hands on his hips.

  “I told you…” His eyes widen as he sees Schoon.

  “This is…these are…” Märit stammers, then gathers her composure. “We have visitors, Khoza. Go and put on the kettle and prepare some tea.”

  But he just stares dumbfounded at Schoon.

  “You heard the Missus, boy,” Schoon says, pushing into the house.

  Khoza retreats. He stares wide-eyed at Märit, as if this is some trick she has played on him.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Schoon says with irritation.

  As Khoza turns towards the kitchen, the other soldiers appear and he backs away from them looking wildly about him, like a trapped animal seeking escape.