by Zoe Wicomb
For Jake, that is all their childhood has been: the fear of Father and God. In that order. Why was it impossible for him to summon the cool of summer evenings when they finished the chores, the sheep and chickens put to rest under flaming skies, and the sudden dip of the sun that would plunge all into darkness? Then they sat outdoors and listened to the swallows swooping in and out of the eaves. In December they sang carols, their mother teaching them to harmonize, and they laughed at the old man’s off-key voice. Hark the herald angels si-ing. The beauty of the word, hark, that made you sit bolt upright and feel the quiver of bats as they dived. Then Father, scrambling for his rightful place, would say, Look at the stars. Come and find the Southern Cross, the Three Kings, the Bear.
When the sun’s lingering on Capricorn brought the fiercest heat, Mercia and Jake would sleep under the stars on the old wooden trailer, and watch the Three Kings beaming and bending over the newborn Christ child. Jake was her darling baby brother whose antics made her laugh, for whom she feared, and as the fresh morning air arrived the children snuggled close together under the yawning stars.
Mercia drifts from the southern December to the lingering light of the Scottish summer. After all these years the slow inching of day to darkness still brings melancholia; for all its reliability still creeps upon her as a surprising ache of weltschmerz, until darkness finally engulfs the day. Now sitting in Sylvie’s yard, she thinks of that dusk-bound sadness as a longing for the African night, for blackness that like a screen is swiftly, securely drawn across the sky, obliterating the day in a quick, decisive death—obliterating guilt.
Oh, she hears again Craig’s lilting brogue, his steady hand mixing her a drink. Your sundowner, Madam, he would jest. Wrong hemisphere, she’d groan. Sundowners were for Europeans trying to adjust to the swift descent of the African night. Over forgetful drink, they flocked together to counter angst and fear, for otherwise the world would yawn with the descent of darkness, showing its inner space, and who could stand that? Certainly not those who had left home in search of a better life in the colonies.
And you? Craig asked, the people of Kliprand, too indigenous to be afraid of the dark?
Precisely, she laughed peevishly. Not a problem in your own, your home hemisphere.
Mercia wonders if that perhaps is what children are for, to ease the shift from day to night through bustling, tiring chores. No, of course not; she knows that dispensing care is not the business of a child.
And now, where is Craig? As she catches a star skidding across the familiar southern sky it feels as if her barely mended heart will break once more.
Oh, this can do no good, this harking back, broken—a far cry from the summery hark of angels.
Jake the monster is bellowing from his room, throws what sounds like a shoe against the door, barely audible above the voices of the soap opera that Sylvie is watching. Transfixed by the television, she doesn’t hear him. Mercia rises. It is preposterous, Jake behaving like a child, refusing to get out of bed. She barges into his room and gropes for the light switch. A bare bulb casts dim, eerie light onto a figure she cannot bear to look at. He is lying on his back, his hands on the bedcover are shaking; his eyes are screwed shut against the dangling lightbulb, his face yellow-brown and bathed in sweat.
It’s evening, time to get up, she says briskly. I’ve come all this way and you haven’t as much as looked at me.
Jake opens his eyes and looks at her, squinting. Get me a drink, he growls. He tries to lean down to retrieve a wine box from the floor but doesn’t manage. It’s empty, he says, that bitch hasn’t brought my drink.
Forgotten your manners, have you, dear ogre? That’s no way to speak of your wife, Mercia says. Stop this ludicrous behavior right now. You’re an adult, so get out of bed and see to your own needs. And while you’re about it, pay some attention to your child. He didn’t ask to be here.
Jake clutches his aching head. My child? Well, neither do I want him here. It’s all down to that bitch and her scheming. Please man, Mercy, he pleads, get me a drink, anything. He tries to get out of bed but falls back with exhaustion. Perspiration beads on his upper lip, and his thin arms tremble.
I’ll get Sylvie for you, Mercia relents, but only if you promise to speak politely. And to see a doctor tomorrow. You’re sick, you need help, Jake; you’ve got to stop drinking.
Yes, yes, yes, he says. I promise. You’re right. I’ll do whatever you say, just get me a drink now.
Sylvie is irritated. He can wait, she says, now speaking quietly, her eyes fixed on the television screen. He’s a liar. You mustn’t believe a thing he says. Promises! She laughs bitterly, then stops to concentrate on a woman on the screen who speaks indistinctly through dramatic sobs.
Ag no shame, Sylvie tuts, it isn’t that poor Thandi’s fault, then she returns to the real-life drama at home: I’ve heard plenty of Jake’s lies. The only promise I believe in is that he wants to kill us, me and Nicky. It’s just that he doesn’t have the strength, but he’ll think of some way to do it. Just you wait and see when—
She stops in midsentence as the camera returns to the sobbing woman, but when the advertising jingle starts up, she says, He killed your father, you know.
•••
Jake did not aspire to doing well at school, but without much effort he excelled in mathematics and science. Which he resented for the pleasure it brought their father. See, he said bitterly, how it encourages the old man to make up more and more rules: in bed by nine, up at five; nothing other than mealie porridge for breakfast, which made Jake gag; no sweets; no pocket money; no radio during the week; only study, study, study. No this, no that, a mouthful of homilies, and stupid idioms: spare the rod and spoil the child; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; make hay while the sun shines; honor thy mother and thy father that thy days may be lengthened in the land of the Lord; and the usual nonsense about gratitude. Oh, it made him sick. If Gentle Jesus were meek and mild how could it be good for a child to be bullied and beaten? How could the Hit Parade or pictures of John Travolta or Grace Jones that he had put up on the wall be bad?
He loves me yeah, yeah, yeah, Jake intoned slowly, solemnly, parodying the old man, old Who-art-in-heaven. He said the old man was pure evil. Even God could not have been as petty as their father. If that was what paternal love was, please could he be an unloved, abandoned orphan? The very word, love, made him want to reach for a knobkierie; he would club to death anyone who claimed to love him.
Jake did not despise their mother for her silent complicity, for agreeing with the old man. Yes, Nettie knew how unreasonable the old man’s rules were, but he believed her hands to be tied, that she too was subject to Nicholas’s wrath.
Jake’s revenge came in his first year at university, some years after Nettie’s death. I don’t think, he said languidly—stretching rudely at the breakfast table, savoring the effect and calculating the hurt—nah, I don’t think I’ll be bothering with the kak of exams this year.
Nicholas frowned, cleared his throat; he surely hadn’t heard correctly. What was that? Ignoring the rude word, he asked, Do you mean you’d like to go back to bed like a lazy hotnot and sleep till midday, rather than do your duty?
Precisely, Jake retorted, glad you understand that this is it. I’m finished with university.
He pushed back his plate of mealie porridge and leaned back, tilting his chair. Jake was proud of his defiance. He laughed uproariously when the old man said that he was not too old for a hiding.
Jake could no longer bear to be dependent on their father. I don’t want the vark’s money, he explained to Mercia, and university loans are only for those who become teachers. Can’t face that, so I’m off. Plenty of jobs in the liquor trade, and it suits me fine that the vark’s disappointment is such that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Serves him right for ramming down my throat that he’d sacrificed himself for us. All those pathetic tales of a snot-nosed barefoot child with no schooling, pulling himself up by his
own bootstraps, dragging himself through night school, the scrimping and scraping by and going without in order to fulfill his promise to Mummy that we’ll go to university—I’ve had enough of that.
Boring an index finger into his right temple, Jake mimed their father’s madness. Old Who-art-in-heaven’s off his head hey, stupid, thinking that if you shout the word gratitude long and hard enough at children that’s precisely what they’ll feel. What kind of gratitude is that that has to be implanted by the giver? Mercy, you too should leave, he urged, get out of his bullying grasp.
But I’m at the end of my honors year, she said. It wouldn’t make sense.
Oh no, he mocked, the old boy will have an idiom for it. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, he intoned. No man, Mercia, he said, shaking his head. It’s a matter of principle. Besides, the price for this grand education is eternal obedience. No thanks, he can stuff it up his arse. Jake spat a spectacular far-reaching arc of spittle through his front teeth. Look where obedience has got him. A bloody apartheid collaborator. I’m surprised he’s not stood for the tricameral colored parliament.
Grateful that her exams were no longer the topic, Mercia said that it wasn’t fair. Yes, the old man was flawed, but he was their father, and who was without flaws? He belonged to another generation, and the truth was that she did feel grateful to him for living a life of frugality and penny-pinching in order to pay for their education. And Jake’s assessment of his politics was unfair. He was not a revolutionary, it was true; he kept his head down, keeping out of the way of what he saw as trouble, but he had taught them self-respect, never to capitulate to whiteness.
Oh yes, Jake snarled, self-preservation all right. And what about Africans? Did he teach us to respect the people of this country? Or the people of Kliprand? What does he mean when he says they’re not our kind of people?
Then Mercia refused to argue with him. Jake was intolerant, did not appreciate the difficulties of a previous generation who barely managed to raise their heads above water. You don’t understand how difficult it is to think outside of the dominant ideology, she sighed.
Ideology! Bugger that claptrap, he snarled, that can’t be an excuse. Others managed, why can’t he?
Mercia clutched at straws. Could their father not be thought to mimic obedience to the state? Which made Jake laugh. The old man simply did not make sense, he said, toeing the apartheid line, and at the same time crediting himself with independent thought, with being different.
It was true that Nicholas insisted that they were different, that living amongst the Namaquas did not make Namaquas of the Murrays. The people around them were not their kind, and thus Nicholas taught his children to speak English. Which meant that they were not to play with others who spoke Afrikaans. Besides, the children had each other, and friendship was a dubious category that only led to evil. It would be friends who would persuade them to smoke or drink alcohol, lead them astray to do or think the countless bad things that young people were prone to do. It was, according to their father, important to remember that they did not belong there.
Then where did they belong? they wanted to know.
Nicholas was puzzled by the question. Why belong to any place or any people in particular? They simply belonged, a word that need not be followed by where or to. For a moment Mercia feared that he would say: I am who I am. But he explained that Kliprand was inhabited by uncouth, uneducated people. Yes, their home was there, but the Murrays couldn’t possibly think of belonging there. As long as they could fit in anywhere with decent people, also city people, that was the important thing, that was where they would be at home. By which, of course, he meant English-speaking coloreds with straight hair, skin color being less important than hair, the crucial marker of blackness. Jake guffawed. Did Nicholas not know that all coloreds had European ancestors? If it were only those with visible genetic links that counted, he would happily grow his hair to accentuate the frizz. Which he did.
Thus the notion of home was revised. Decoupled from location and belonging, and crucially from community, it was shrunk into a prefabricated rectangular structure of walls that could be dropped down anywhere as long as it was surrounded by people who looked like them, people related to them. As for Nicholas’s own family, they were raised in respectable God-fearing countryside, Nettie’s at a mission station founded by real Europeans, and even if the Malherbes were Afrikaans speaking, they had good European blood.
Okay, Mercia conceded, the old man was deluded, poisoned by an atrocious apartheid ideology, but he was still their father, a man with many admirable qualities, in short, a good man. As his children, did they not owe him some loyalty, even love?
That’s just moffie talk, girls’ stuff. Certainly not what the mighty Shakespeare thought, Jake, who had studied The Merchant of Venice at Matric, retorted. You should know this. Because Shylock is greedy and evil, his daughter doesn’t owe him any loyalty. And not a word of remorse. “In such a night did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, and with an unthrift love did run from Venice,” he quoted. Mercia envied his ability to remember.
Ah, she said, a good example of the ideology you call claptrap. Shakespeare shows this anti-Semitic nonsense to be wrong, shows us that Shylock is a victim of prejudice and hypocrisy. But Shakespeare himself, trapped in Christian ideology, asks us to approve Jessica’s theft and disloyalty. It’s interesting that she should fall in love with a Christian, but one would expect ambivalence, not an outright rejection of the father; love shouldn’t clench the heart in such an unnatural way.
Crap, Jake said, confidently. The story shows ultimately that Shylock’s rubbish, so he deserves rejection and humiliation. Listen, I can’t believe people get degrees for this kind of foolish reasoning. I’d say, pack it in, Mercia, you could have a decent job all the same. Please don’t take his money. Together, the two of us will manage. Old Who-art-in-heaven hasn’t earned our love. You too must be sick of hearing about saving and sacrificing himself for our education. It’s plain old meanness and megalomania.
Try to understand, she pleaded. His own father wouldn’t let him go to school, sent him out to plow the land. You shouldn’t rely on dictionary definitions of meanness. People who have little, or who are threatened, necessarily guard their pennies. Frugality is not the same as meanness, and Father is never mean to others. He’s never refused to help people out in this community. Take Scottish meanness. The tag tells us more about the culture that assigns the label and has no ability to see things from the point of view of another. They do not understand that frugality, practiced by and for the self, can go hand in hand with generosity directed at others.
Craig used to joke about being the penny-pinching Scot. Aye, we have to weigh ourselves down with two bottles of wine, a box of chocolates, flowers and a paperback when we go to someone’s house for a bite to eat, so as to prove to the English that we’re not mean. The wine, of course, is also to keep up with the label of drunken Scot. Aye right, it’s a burden, so it is.
Then his eyebrows would shoot up comically, perfectly shaped arcs, beautiful as a girl’s.
The little girl in a blue gingham dress that Antoinette fashioned out of her own frock that no longer fits sits proudly on her father’s shoulders as he goes about tending to the animals, checking on the broody hens, and collecting eggs from others.
Look, he says, how different the little bantam egg is, and he helps her down to peer into the nest. She wants to hold in her hand the perfect oval miniature, and he gets it for her whilst the little hen cackles angrily.
Is it the same as other eggs inside? the child asks, cupping the delicate shell, tinged a deeper brown.
Father says yes, later they’ll crack the egg, examine the yellow yolk and the white albumen. He knows that Mummy will need some for supper, that she would be more than happy to add the bantam egg. Bantams are not much use, but Nettie so wanted a pair that he gave in, and really it is nice to see these swaggering little things boasting their difference amongst the Rhode Isla
nd reds. See, he says, how different types have different characteristics, different natures. Foolish to think that everyone is the same, or equal.
Mercia is allowed to carry the precious egg. Indoors, they crack it into a saucer. The tiny yellow center floats on the quivering translucent white. Yolk and albumen, she repeats after him. He writes down the words that she has to copy on her slate.
It was the screech of pencil on slate that returned Mercia to the garden, where Jake was smoking a furtive cigarette. He said, bullshit, that she romanticized. False memory, he warned, nostalgia for an affectionate father, for things that never happened. Had she chosen to forget the hidings and the terrible sermons?
But how could an adult hold such petty grudges? The trouble with you, Jake, Mercia remonstrated, is that you refuse to understand the pressures under which that generation was raised. Empathy, my bro, can’t you summon empathy? The large families, the poverty, and lack of education. They did what they thought was best, and that is why you should forgive and forget. Larkin got it only partially right: yes, they were fucked up in their turn; it goes back and back, but it is unreasonably misanthropic to imagine that they add some extra just for you. The very fact that we can be clear eyed about their bad parenting shows that our lives are an improvement on theirs. Surely we inherit less rancor than they did. Come on, you too were a kid. You too must have larked about on the garden wall chanting, I’m the king of the castle. You too would have said, I’m going to jump, will you catch me? And of course, he did; there was no question. That is what a father is for.
