My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  At one point, a tree had come down across the stream and, caught in its branches, plants and grass like straggling hair had tangled into a barrier throwing back a pool of brown scum. The barrier wasn’t complete, however, for near where I stood on the bank the stream jostled through a gap and even before it rounded the next curve had doubled in size, pushing out a space against the other bank. The second or third time I went by, I caught a splash out of the corner of my eye and then I saw the surface opposite was covered with circles. I decided there must be fish there in the darker water and that they were rising to eat, little flies, maybe, or insects too small for me to see from the bank. I don’t know how long it took me to work that out, but when I started walking again I felt relaxed and pleased with myself. QED, like one of the demonstrations in White and Morrison’s Geometry.

  The path, as far as I was concerned, ended just beyond the pool. Another fallen tree, held up by its broken stump, lay like a bridge across the track. Peeping under it, I was discouraged by a view of bushes. The nearest one had branches of small, tight-packed leaves and dark thorns long as fingers, which put me off the idea of trying to push through. And after all, what would be on the other side? More of the same – the countryside was like that. I went back and lay down to doze by the pool.

  One of the afternoons I was doing that, I sensed a shadow and felt a little wind on my cheek. A cloud had slipped over the sun. The instant I opened my eyes, I knew I was being watched. Instead of sitting up, I raised my head very slowly: a red deer was drinking from the stream. It was the first wild animal I’d ever seen and I had the illusion that, though it stood on a patch of sand under the opposite bank, if I stretched out my hand I could touch it. In a moment, it looked up, flared its nostrils, and didn’t so much bound as float to the top of the bank. Then it was gone.

  No one was in sight among the shadows under the trees behind me.

  Whatever they were like when they were alone, Eileen and Beate were quiet at the dinner table. Beate got up to serve, and when she put down our plates the four of us ate with our eyes on the food. August had that effect. Rebelling against it, I cast around for something to say and finally came up with ‘This must seem very different from South Africa.’

  ‘South Africa?’ August raised his eyebrows and glanced at Beate. He smiled as if something amused him.

  I looked at her, too. She stared back at me.

  Eileen said, ‘Beate’s been telling me about the farm where she grew up, the farm on the veldt.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ he wondered.

  ‘Sorry?’ Eileen looked puzzled.

  ‘I expect you did. Beate tells a good story.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I enjoyed listening to her.’

  ‘If you like stories, I’ll tell you a story. When I was a lot younger than your son,’ he said, ‘I’d regularly come home in the dark or first light. My father got pretty mad. He beat me for years and then I got too big. I knew he did it for my own good, and I didn’t mind. But I got too big. All my family were like that, grew big and tall, the women as much as the men. I come from good stock, I tell you. Trekkers. When Piet Retief and Gert Maritz came up from the Cape Colony, our family was with them – 1838 that was. The Zulus killed Retief and Maritz. That’s how our town got its name, Pietermaritzburg.’

  ‘I don’t think it was 1838,’ Beate said. For some reason, she had become sullen.

  ‘Wouldn’t a good Boer know a thing like that? Believe me. In here is full of dates and facts.’ He tapped a finger on his forehead. ‘Don’t try to tell me about South Africa. Anyway, I was a wild boy, but at a certain point of the night I’d turn my back on them all and head for home. Wasn’t anything going on I wanted more than what I’d find at home.’ He smiled, his gaze lingering on each of us. ‘Going back, early in the morning, the streets would be quiet – as quiet as this.’ He gestured at the night outside the little windows. ‘Trees both sides at the edges of the pavements. But I walked in the middle of the road. You know why? Because it was a kaffir trick to hide among the leaves and drop down on you. A cart went round in the morning and you’d see dogs on it, a pile of them with their throats cut. Every house had its guard dogs.’ Startlingly, he gulped at the air and swung his head from side to side. ‘So you’d go along like this, keeping a sharp watch, and listening, and sniffing the air. Because you could smell them: they don’t smell like white men.’ He fixed his eyes on me. ‘Maybe you are one of those people who don’t like that said?’

  The lamp on the shelf threw his shadow across the table. I didn’t feel like arguing, but although I didn’t look at her I could feel that Eileen was watching me. ‘There was a teacher at school,’ I said. ‘He told us they didn’t let Jews into his golf club. He told us they’d blown up a friend of his in a hotel in Jerusalem. I asked him, what about Germans? Did they get into his golf club?’

  ‘He must have loved you,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  My uneasy feeling was that, as Eileen began to get better, August didn’t want to let me out of his sight. I tried to control my imagination and found a comforting explanation for the fact he had started finding jobs for us to do together. He’d been kind, I told myself, letting us stay and not taking any money. Maybe he regretted being so generous, and wanted something in return. When I thought about it that made sense. Let Eileen rest. I didn’t mind hard work.

  It wasn’t all that hard, in fact. He gave me a scythe and taught me how to use it, and I spent the day after he’d talked about Pietermaritzburg cutting overgrown grass and clearing stones off a patch of ground at the side of the house until I could smell my own sweat. The day after, I helped him to rehang a gate in a fence which made a narrow yard in front of the pen where he kept three pigs. As we worked, one of them lay on her side, watching with small, intent eyes, while a line of young fastened themselves on the teats along her belly.

  We planted potatoes, too, digging the furrows and dropping them in about a foot apart and then pulling the soil across the rows. That was done on another bit of ground, between the end of the house and where the line of trees began. It was a fair size, but more like an oversized plot in a garden than what I would have thought of as a field. On the other side of the barn and sheds, there was a pasture, still not all that big, in which a solitary cow, brown and shaggy with curved horns, grazed forlornly.

  The strange thing is that I slept well. Hard work in the open air meant there were no bad dreams. It disturbed me, though, how little he spoke when we were alone. Even when we had a break at midday, for a thick ham sandwich and a glass of milk, he chewed with his head over a book. While we worked, if I looked up and found his eye on me, it was only for an instant, then he glanced away. His instructions were clear and he seemed content with how I followed them. All the time, I was aware of the raw power of him, the wads of muscle at the sides of his neck, the hands like shovels; yet to admit to finding that menacing would have been shameful, or so it seemed to me.

  I disliked the scythe in those big hands and was glad when, after a few long, slow sweeps to show me how, he passed it over to me. ‘It’s sharp,’ he said. ‘Mind you don’t cut off your feet.’

  The day after we put in the potatoes I overslept and opened my eyes to see Beate wiping dishes and stacking them at the side of the sink. I slipped out of the couch bed while she had her back to me; but she turned while I was balanced on one leg to get into my trousers.

  ‘Is it all right if I take a piece of bread?’ I asked, turning away from her to pull up the zip.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘What kind of breakfast would that be? I’ll make you porridge.’

  I sat at the table and watched as she put a handful of meal in a pot with water. She stirred the pot on the stove and I looked at the length of her back and her legs under the dress. The dress was grey and that was the impression she’d made on me, quiet and grey. The material of it was thin, however, and when she bent the cloth settled round her hips so that I could see the shape of her bottom un
der it. After all, she wasn’t that much older than me, a handful of years, not more than ten, surely? Even her face, which had seemed so dull before, had a kind of sparkle when she turned unexpectedly from the stove and caught my eye on her.

  ‘How much do you want in the bowl? My husband takes it full.’

  ‘Plenty of room for the milk would be fine, thanks.’

  When she put the bowl in front of me, I expected her to get on with her work. Instead, she sat down across the table and watched me as I ate, the first spoonful the cream of the milk and then the porridge itself with an aftertaste of salt.

  ‘Where does August want me this morning?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s not here. Did he not say yesterday?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘He’s away to town for some shopping.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So you can take it easy.’

  ‘I don’t mind working.’

  ‘It’s done you good. You’re not so pale as you were.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. She studied me while I ate. Embarrassed, I said, ‘I’ll take some breakfast up.’

  ‘For your mother? But she’s away, too.’

  ‘Where?’ I was on the point of starting up and running out to see if the car was gone.

  ‘She was down by the time he was getting ready, and he asked if she wanted to go with him.’

  ‘And she just went?’ I heard the break in my voice and cleared my throat.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were the same green as the eyes of a redheaded girl who’d sat across the aisle in the French class in my last year at school; the special hard, flat green that goes with red hair, though Beate’s was brown. Until that morning when we were alone, it was as if I hadn’t really seen her at all.

  It was into the afternoon before they came back. I watched as August took a box out of the back seat and carried it into the house.

  Eileen smiled at me as she got out of the car. ‘I’ve been well looked after. I spent most of the time sitting on a bench in the sun while August shopped. And then we went to a little café and had lunch.’ I stared at her without replying. I wondered if he’d found his tongue with her. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d gone.’ I couldn’t help making it sound like an accusation.

  ‘You slept all through us leaving. He must have tired you out yesterday.’

  For no good reason, this offended me. I scowled at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘I don’t feel sick.’ She stretched her arms wide. ‘It’s wonderful to feel human again.’

  When we went inside, the box of shopping was sitting on the kitchen table. To help Beate, who was putting away the contents, I began to hand her packets of salt, blocks of soap, toilet paper, a floppy package in a wrapping of thick white paper that might have held fish; and, surprising me, half a dozen tins of custard.

  Seeing me look at them, Beate said, ‘That’s August’s treat.’

  I didn’t know whether to smile or nod. Maybe he ate them all himself, and she was warning me off.

  Anyway, treat or not, none of the tins appeared at that evening’s meal. While we ate – the usual solid plateful of meat and potatoes – Eileen tried to make sociable conversation. It was an uphill battle, for August had fallen back on silence, making me wonder if it was my company which had that effect on him. It was a relief when, unexpectedly, Beate began to talk about her life as a child on a farm far out on the South African veldt.

  ‘We were surrounded by space to the horizons,’ she said. ‘A wonderful life for a child, like being on an island. And the sky at night was crammed with stars.’

  ‘Plenty of stars here,’ August said. It was the first time he’d spoken during the meal. If he’d found his tongue when he was alone with Eileen, he seemed to have lost it again.

  ‘They aren’t the same stars,’ she said on an odd note of triumph. ‘I used to lie on my back and look up at them. It felt like falling.’

  ‘Were you an only child?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘I was a lonely one. Lonely all the time. Until I met August.’

  Putting a forkful of food in his mouth, he glanced up at her but said nothing.

  ‘Did you meet as children?’ Eileen sounded startled, but somehow pleased. Maybe she thought that would have been romantic.

  ‘Oh, no!’ She shook her head vigorously. It was very emphatic.

  She doesn’t think it’s romantic, I thought sourly.

  ‘Beate came to town to work as a servant.’ August broke his silence again. Wiping his mouth, he said, ‘It happened to be in my father’s house.’

  ‘Not polishing and dusting,’ Beate said. She frowned at him, lines wrinkling her high, pale forehead. ‘Blacks did that kind of work.’

  ‘We could do with one here,’ he said. ‘A strong kaffir girl.’

  ‘We had plenty of kaffirs on the farm,’ she said, ‘men and women. My mother kept the women in the house busy, and my father worked the men hard – he had no patience with slackers.’

  ‘You can’t stop a kaffir taking it easy,’ August said. ‘It’s their nature. If it wasn’t for the white man they’d sit on their’ – he glanced at Eileen – ‘sit around all day. Nothing was done with the land when they had it.’

  Eileen looked from husband to wife, then at me. I chewed and stared down at my plate. There didn’t seem much room for either of us to say anything. Probing, as if with sword-tips testing for weakness, our hosts were absorbed with each other.

  ‘When I was eleven I saw my father beat a kaffir to death,’ Beate said. ‘He thrashed him with a long black whip that was used on the cattle.’

  I realised my mouth had fallen open, and shut it.

  ‘They call a whip like that a sjambok.’ August offered this matter-of-factly, a piece of information we might find of interest. It didn’t help.

  To my amazement, Eileen asked, ‘Is that how you pronounce it?’

  August lifted his black eyebrows at her and nodded.

  I couldn’t believe she’d heard what Beate had just said.

  ‘That’s the correct way,’ he said as if settling an argument.

  ‘The whip took strips of flesh off,’ Beate intervened firmly. ‘Blood came up in sprays, I’ve never forgotten that. It was all so amazing. I couldn’t look away. When my father finished, you could see the old man’s spine: white bone and tatters of black skin.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked. I was surprised to hear my voice, thin and almost trembling.

  ‘They took him to hospital, but he died a week later.’

  ‘Your father, I mean.’ Your fucking brute of a father. ‘At his trial.’

  ‘Trial?’ August wondered. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘How could he get away with that?’

  ‘Oh, but he didn’t,’ Beate said. She was answering me, but she didn’t take her eyes from August. ‘He was taken to court. I remember how angry he was about being fined. So, you see, he didn’t get away with it.’

  Head to one side, Eileen was gazing at Beate and I couldn’t catch her eye.

  ‘Terrible things happen in the world,’ August said.

  ‘Like the Nazis,’ his wife said.

  ‘Why bring them up?’ he asked with a frown.

  I knew the kind of terrible thing Beate was thinking of.

  ‘Like the teachers in Norway,’ I said.

  Husband and wife turned on me identical expressions of surprise. It was as if they had forgotten I was there.

  He got up abruptly. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Good night,’ Eileen said, but he was already out of the room.

  When Beate yawned, she didn’t cover her mouth with her hand. Before it closed, she wiped her tongue over her lips. Quick and pink, it was like a small animal.

  ‘If it’s that time,’ she said.

  In a moment, Eileen and I were left on our own.

  ‘What was that about?’ I wondered if she had heard me. My voic
e wasn’t much above a whisper. I needed her to say something reassuring.

  ‘They wanted to get to bed,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not late.’ I waited. Then I said, ‘I meant all that stuff about her father. Beating an old man to death with a whip.’

  ‘A sjambok.’

  ‘That’s not how he said it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a word he’s only read.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ Not with him being South African, I meant.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  The way she said it shut me out of whatever she might be thinking.

  ‘Why would she tell us a thing like that?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know what it was about, any more than you?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I woke in the morning out of a strange dream. By the time I opened my eyes it was gone, leaving only the image of a clock with a statuette of a woman on top. She was half undraped, so that her little breasts were uncovered. Mired in sleep still, I felt them under my fingers, cold and hard as pebbles. As I lay thinking about them, I remembered that it was the clock in Eileen’s room upstairs. I’d seen it that first day when I took up her case, out of place in that bare room beside the narrow bed.

  I’d pulled the blanket up over my head as I slept. Going by the other mornings, I assumed August was already out and about, but lying there I missed the smell of food and the sounds Beate made as she moved about. When I tugged the blanket off, the room was empty. According to the clock on the wall, it was just after seven. Half dressed, still pulling on my shirt, I went to the window and there husband and wife were in the middle of the yard, heads bowed as if staring at the ground, silent but close together. I took a step back, not wanting to be seen, but as I did she reached out her hand and he took it, and hand in hand the two of them went out of the yard towards the woods. The air was full of early sunlight. Black shadows from the byre and the shed beside it stretched half across the yard. If I was surprised to see them go off like that, it was because I’d a vague idea that for people on farms the country was for work not pleasure. All the same, if they wanted to go walking, what business was it of mine? It was a fine morning.