by Lewis Desoto
There is a radiance and contentment around Tembi, a radiance that comes from within.
“Where is Khoza?” Tembi asks as she sits down.
“He went out…hunting.”
Tembi smiles, the smile of a woman who is no longer a girl. “He will come back soon.”
IN THE FARMHOUSE, as the two women clear up the breakfast dishes, Märit cannot keep her eyes from following Tembi; she glows as if in a shaft of sunlight.
Märit feels a mixture of sadness and something else that is both bitter and sweet. But she no longer feels jealousy. All of that has drained away from her. She is not jealous of the woman for her possession of the man, nor is she jealous of the man.
She marvels a bit at this, for she remembers the past days, all the days since Khoza came to the farm. He has looked upon Märit as a woman, and has touched her, and she has touched him. But what has happened was inevitable. A part of her knew it would come, ever since that first moment when Khoza came into the house as a stranger and Tembi’s face lit up in greeting when she saw him.
And so Märit feels something else now, something bitter-sweet, both a sadness and a joy. She looks upon Tembi with joy, for the girl who has become a woman, and she looks upon Tembi with sorrow, because the innocent girl she has known is gone. Her own innocence too. Sometimes Märit feels that she was born old, with the melancholy of age, with a soul that has never known innocence.
When Tembi says, “I wonder what is taking Khoza so long?” Märit looks upon her with sadness, because now Tembi will know the bitterness that love always brings.
51
IN THE ORCHARD Tembi waits. She picks idly at the few apricots and peaches that are ripe and begins to make a small pile of the fruits she has gathered.
All the while she keeps her eye on the veldt beyond the farm, waiting for the shape of the man to appear, the man who will come back to her. There is no thought in her mind that he will not come back. How could he not, after the tenderness of last night? No, her man has gone into the veldt to bring back food, and he will come back to her. So she waits, content in herself.
When she hears the slight rumble of thunder Tembi raises her eyes to the sky, the blue sky that is empty of clouds, and she turns to look to the veldt, because the thunder vibrates in the earth under her feet.
The horsemen are almost upon her before she sees them. Her eyes register uniforms, the glint of guns. Soldiers on horseback. But at the same time her eyes recognize the color of their skin, and it is the same as hers. Her fear lessens slightly, but a soldier is still a soldier, and in a time of war this is always a sight to fear.
Then she sees Khoza, on foot, trotting behind the horsemen.
The gladness in her heart to see the man coming back to her is overtaken by dread. Why is he bringing soldiers to the house?
She is torn between running to Khoza and running back to Märit. She turns back to the house and runs inside.
“Märit! Märit! There are soldiers!”
Märit sticks her head out of the bedroom. “They’re back?”
“But Märit, they are black soldiers. And Khoza is with them.”
Märit’s shoulders slump. “Have they come from across the border?”
“I don’t know. But they mustn’t find you!”
“What does it matter?”
“But we don’t know what they want here.”
“Soldiers do whatever they want,” Märit says with resignation.
“They mustn’t find you.” Tembi grasps Märit by the arms. “You have to hide. The kraal! You can hide there in one of the huts.”
Märit stands in the center of the room passively.
Tembi hustles her to the kitchen and peers out the back door. “Go on, Märit! Hide in one of the huts until they are gone.” She gives her a push. “I’ll come for you later.”
Without urgency Märit walks down the path and through the trees.
Only when Märit is out of sight does Tembi turn and go to meet the soldiers, and Khoza.
The horsemen come to a halt at the foot of the veranda. Khoza does not come forward, and she realizes by the expression on his face that something is wrong. Have they captured him for some reason? But they are black soldiers. They are not the enemy.
One of the men urges his horse forward.
He is thick in the chest and shoulders, his uniform clean and neat, and he sits in the saddle with an air of authority. He is not like the soldiers who were here last night, who had a desperate and unkempt look about them and watched every little move she made.
“Sawubona, sister,” the man says. “I greet you.”
“Sawubone, Nkosi,” Tembi answers, using a title of respect. She inclines her head slightly.
He smiles down at Tembi. “What is your name, sister?”
“I am called Tembi, Nkosi.”
“You may call me Captain. Do you live here? With this young man?”
“Yes, Nkosi. We live here.”
“Just the two of you?”
Tembi tries not to look at Khoza. What has he told them? “Yes, Nkosi. Just the two of us now.”
“We have come a long way and we are thirsty. You will invite us into your house?”
“Of course, Nkosi. Please.”
He dismounts. “Yes, why don’t we sit in your comfortable kitchen and drink a cup of tea together? And this young man as well—Mr. Khoza. Come and join us, Mr. Khoza.”
Tembi hurries to the kitchen to put the kettle on. She sees through the open door that there are soldiers at the back of the house too, but they seem to be taking no interest in the kraal.
The captain enters the kitchen, his boots loud on the floor, and pulls out a chair. “Sit here, Mr. Khoza.” He takes a seat on the other side of the table.
Tembi prepares the tea.
“So,” the captain says, “just the two of you living here in this nice house.”
Tembi shoots a quick glance at Khoza but his face tells her nothing.
“The farmer died. And the workers left. The Missus too. After that we moved into the house.”
“You didn’t want to leave with the other workers?”
“There was nowhere to go.”
She sets two cups of tea on the table and a plate of rusks.
The captain dips a rusk into the tea and chews it slowly. “Very good. I like rusks with my tea. Did you bake these yourself, sister?”
She nods.
He reaches for another rusk and looks up at her, his hand poised over the cup. “You must be glad to have some visitors, you and your young man all alone out here, so far from everything?”
“Yes, it’s nice.”
“And who else has been to see you lately?”
Tembi looks at Khoza.
“I ask you, not him,” the captain says, still very polite.
“There have been no visitors, Nkosi.” She looks down at her hands.
A figure passes by the doorway, a head looks in briefly and withdraws. There is something familiar in the glimpsed face, but her attention is drawn back to the captain.
“When I came into the kitchen I noticed three cups in the sink, not two. Why is that, if there are only two of you?”
Khoza is the one who answers. “Because I took a cup of tea to Tembi this morning when she was still in bed. Later, when we had breakfast, she took a clean cup from the cupboard.”
Now Tembi knows that Khoza has said nothing about Märit. But she still does not know why Khoza has brought the soldiers. It dawns on her that it was they who brought him, not the other way round.
“How nice,” the captain says, “just the two of you living here, and bringing each other cups of tea.”
A man steps into the room. “She is lying!”
A soldier, but less well outfitted than the others, although he wears a beret and has a bandolier of bullets across his chest and a bayonet in a scabbard at his waist. He pulls off his beret with an angry gesture. “She is lying, Captain.”
And now Tembi knows why the gesture of that he
ad poking into the room a moment ago was familiar. She knows this man.
It is Joshua.
“They are both lying,” Joshua says. “Where is the white woman? She wouldn’t leave this farm.”
The captain regards Tembi mildly. “Well, sister, do you have anything to say?”
“She left, a long time ago.”
“Maybe they killed her,” Joshua says, showing his discolored teeth in a sly leer. “And buried her in the fields, or in the kraal.”
“It’s this matter of the third cup that bothers me,” the captain tells Tembi. “It bothers me just a little bit too much, so that I don’t entirely believe you. And Mr. Khoza here, he seems to me to be quite nervous. Joshua, you know this farm—take some men and search the place.”
Tembi gets up from her chair.
“No, sister, you can stay here. We will have some more tea. Just the three of us, since there are three cups.”
They sit in silence. Every now and then the captain dips his rusk into the tea and chews slowly.
At last Khoza cannot hold his silence any longer. “Is there war? What is happening out there?”
“Yes, there is war.”
“Are we beating them? Have you killed many? I would like to be out there, making them beg for their lives.”
The captain studies Khoza with a bemused smile. “Why is it that young men are always so eager for killing? Is that the only purpose of war?”
Khoza scowls, and again Tembi wonders what he has told them. Do they know about the soldiers who were here last night? Will they find Märit?
MÄRIT SITS on a metal chair in the darkness of the hut, in the shadows, looking through the open door that frames the landscape—a rectangle of light cut out of the darkness. A bird flies across the canvas of light, perhaps a dove; a small cloud makes a slow trajectory from one corner of the sky to the other. In the thatched roof above her head she hears the faint scratching of a mouse in the straw. Dust motes float in the beam of sunlight like the slow drift of stars. A bead of perspiration trickles slowly down her ribs, as slow as the movement of dust and stars.
They will find her. Of course they will find her. It is inevitable. So she waits for them. And out there in the daylight is the farm. Just a place. No longer her farm, no longer anybody’s farm. Here in the stillness and the shadows of the hut she waits for what will happen.
There have been times when Märit has found herself at the center of a stillness, in a quiet place in the landscape where the only sound is the bending of the blades of grass in a breath of wind, when she has imagined a world emptied of human voices. This farm, this country, this continent, this earth. It has not seemed to her then a difficult thing to leave it all, to go to a place that is nowhere.
She waits, feeling neither fear nor hope. She waits, because all living things wait. But her waiting is without hope. At the end of all her waiting is the end of hope.
Inside the hut the air is close and hot with the smell of straw. A tiny red ant crawls across her forearm. It meanders down across her fingers and then onto the cloth of her sarong. The motion of the ant seems futile to her, as futile as the drift of the dust motes in the beam of sunlight, as futile as the endless turning of the stars behind the thin fabric of the sky. She is without hope, she is without fear.
The shape of a man fills the doorway, darkness blocking the light, and even though she expects this, the suddenness of it makes her flinch—the quick eclipse of the daylight, the violence of another body entering the stillness of the hut.
Märit stands up. The man in the doorway points a gun at her. He has no identity for her, his face is a blank—one of the many, the countless, a child of the locust, come to claim his heritage.
“Here she is!” he cries.
Märit steps forward from the stillness into the storm.
“I told you we would find her,” the soldier shouts. “Now we will see who is lying.”
Märit knows this voice, so victorious at finding her. Yes, she knows him, and he knows her. He rushes towards her, triumphant, and she raises her head in defiance. He lifts his arm above his shoulder and slaps her across the face.
“Now we will see. Eh? Now we will see.”
She raises her head again, in defiance, but he means nothing to her.
She recognizes the old cunning servility in his eyes, like a mark that he can never free himself from, even in his triumph.
“Don’t look at me!” Joshua shouts, and raises his hand again.
Märit turns her back on him and begins to walk towards the house. His footsteps hurry after her, and she feels a shove in her back.
“Your friends are waiting for you. Now we will see, eh!” So close that she feels the spray of warm saliva on her neck.
In the kitchen Märit sees Tembi, and her heart lifts out of the stillness into which it has retreated. She smiles reassuringly, because Tembi’s face is drawn and tight with worry. She smiles to show that she is unhurt and without fear.
Joshua, who has edged in right behind her and now has a tight grip on Märit’s arm, says, “We found her, Captain. Hiding in the kraal. Just like I said. Hiding from us.”
The man at the table looks Märit up and down, taking in her sarong, the doek on her head, the beads and bangles, her bare feet.
“And what are you supposed to be? An African?”
The soldiers laugh and Joshua prods her in the back.
“Who are you?” Märit demands.
“You can call me Captain Simba.”
The men laugh again. She knows this word, it means Lion.
“My name is Märit Laurens. This is my farm.”
“Your farm, you say? For a moment I thought you might be the meid, come to sweep the floor.”
“What do you want here?”
Even as Märit speaks the words she knows it is the wrong thing to say, the tone of her voice is all wrong; it is a question she has asked before, a question any farmer would ask of a stranger on the property, of a black stranger.
“I don’t like that kind of comment,” the captain says. “I have heard it too often from your type.”
She wonders if he too has been a servant in the past. But unlike Joshua, the servility never took root in him.
The captain taps his fingers on the table. “Are there any more of you out there in the kraal? Where is your husband, Missus Laurens?”
“Ask him,” Märit says, shaking herself free from Joshua’s grip. “Isn’t he the one who brought you here so that he could have his revenge on us?”
“There was a husband, sir,” Joshua says. “But he died. A casualty of the military struggle.”
The captain lifts his cup and studies the dregs in the bottom for a moment. “We are not here for anybody’s revenge, Missus Laurens. At least, not upon you.” He looks up. “Although, as the poet has written, ‘if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’”
Märit frowns at him, unsure of where his conversation is leading.
“You don’t know the reference?” the captain asks. “The Merchant of Venice. The Jew Shylock speaking.”
She gives a small shake of her head, which the captain acknowledges with a smile.
“Does it surprise you that a nigger like me can quote Shakespeare? It must be something of a novelty to you Boer farmers, I suppose. But not to worry, we are bringing civilization with us. There is hope for you yet.”
Märit feels out of her depth with this man. She could understand Schoon, whose intentions were always clear, but not this man, who seems not to say what he means, and to disguise what he means by talking of other things. Yet she senses that he is far more dangerous than Schoon ever was.
“What is it you want from me?”
The captain sits up straight, all irony leaving his voice. “Suppose you tell us about your friends, for instance.”
“What friends?”
“Mr. Gideon Schoon.”
“He is not a friend of mine. I barely know the man.”
“But he has been a visitor
here, more than once.”
“Only on official business.”
“Oh, I know all about Mr. Schoon’s official business. He has been a busy man up and down this district. But now I have some business of my own to conduct with him.” He stabs a finger at Märit. “There were soldiers here yesterday, your kind of soldiers. How many were they? Where are they going?”
“There were four of them,” she answers readily. “Three soldiers and Schoon. They stayed only through the night. This morning they were gone.”
“Ah.” The captain turns to Khoza. “Yet this young man, this Mr. Khoza, tells me that there was nobody here. When I found him wandering through the countryside with a gun, he told me that he was hunting. Now, who should I believe?”
“Tell him the truth, Khoza,” Märit says.
Khoza looks down and mumbles, “Yes, they were here. I was hunting them when you found me. I didn’t tell you that because I am the one who will kill Schoon.”
The captain laughs humorlessly. “So you have made the acquaintance of Mr. Schoon.” He turns to Märit again. “Where were they going?”
“South. That’s all he said. The war was going badly here and they were going south.”
“Yes. It is going badly, especially for Mr. Schoon. Well, now, I am certainly eager to meet up with Mr. Schoon. And if there is any question of revenge I will be glad to discuss it with him. But let me ask you another question, Missus Laurens. I am curious—why did you not go with them?”
“There is nowhere to go.”
“Yes, of course. No place to hide.” The captain stands and stretches. “We will rest here a while, Missus Laurens, with your permission. Perhaps you can offer something refreshing to my men?”
“Take whatever it is that you need. Why ask me?”
A flash of anger crosses his eyes, then is gone. He chuckles. “Because we prefer to be civilized. We don’t want to take. Isn’t it much better if you offer hospitality, the same as you did for your friends last night?”
“They are not my friends.”
“No, of course not. At the moment I fear that they are quite friendless.” With his hands on his hips the captain surveys the kitchen. “Well, since you are so eager to dress the part of the meid, Missus Laurens, let us see how well you can play it. My men are hungry and thirsty.”
