October

by Zoe Wicomb

  From then on he avoided her, and Mercia, devastated by his coldness, wrote many a letter, none of which she sent to him. Had she imagined their special relationship? There could be no return to their former camaraderie, and she could not ask, could not bear the What-do-you-mean reply she was sure to get. There was no point to the letters, no real addressee, for the Fanus of old was a phantom. But the writing helped to mend her broken heart.

  It was later that year, in the spring, when she heard from others that Fanus would not be going to university. So much cleverer than she, he was, but the Lategans were poor, the father a farm laborer who would not manage to pay for higher education. They struggled to get their five children through school, and Fanus, as the eldest, had to find work to help with school fees for the rest. It was only fair that they too should have secondary education. Guilt-stricken, and hoping that her father might have a solution, Mercia spoke to him about Fanus, who by now had fused in her mind with the image of a Guguletu schoolboy, arms flung aloft, as the bullet struck.

  Hokaai! her father said, raising his hand into a stop sign. He suspected the boy of political involvement; he would not be surprised if Fanus had chosen this route in order to further his seditious plans, and if that were not the case, the boy, if he had any backbone, would later, through his own efforts, put himself through university. That, after all, was what he, Nicholas, had to do. Had to work as a delivery boy whilst attending night school, and as an adult paid for his own teacher training. Terrible, he tutted, that the poor go on having so many children.

  Mercia felt a second stab of blinding hatred for her father.

  There was no question of speaking to Fanus, who avoided being alone with her. Only once, when in her presence he said that he might not bother with the Matric exams, Mercia interrupted, Ah, but if you were to decide on the day to take them after all, you’d still run off with the prize. Fanus was scornful. A silver trophy! Who cares about that? There’s a fascist regime to be overthrown, work to be done, he said, without looking at her.

  That was, of course, not what she had meant. They would all have refused the silver cup that Dr. Groenewald had bequeathed to the new Colored High School, and she burned with shame. She thought of refusing to go to university until her father paid Fanus’s fees, but what after all would that bring? Fanus would certainly not have accepted, so that all she could wish for was to leave Kliprand, to put behind her the guilt and shame. And she did. In the heady days of political struggle at the-home-of-the-left university, of falling in and out of love, Fanus and Kliprand faded and merged into a place left behind, a place to which she would never return.

  And it turned out, said her father a few years later, that Fanus, just as he suspected, had no backbone after all. Having passed the Matric exam with flying colors, he failed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. By the time he had helped to get the younger ones through school, and was a leading figure in the seditious UDF, he was working as a manager of sorts in a builders’ yard in Kliprand. Some intellectual! Meester snorted.

  So Fanus did not manage to get to university, and Mercia, whose heart was fully mended, assumed that he had like most young men in the village succumbed to drink. In the years that followed, it was not difficult to avoid him during the vacations. Still, she wondered about him, and the trace of guilt persisted for years. Now she cannot help feeling that Fanus has got his revenge. How he must have hated them, the Murrays, who took for granted their privilege.

  She must have said it aloud, for Jake sits up and says, Look, this isn’t about Fanus; it’s about me, about us, our family, and the vark who fathered us. And you shouldn’t hold anything against Fanus. He always asks after you, always wants to know how you’re doing at that university of yours; he thinks you’re dead smart.

  Mercia groans. Oh no, he doesn’t. He knows only too well that he was much cleverer than I, that it’s a world in which I had an unfair advantage. Too late now for the Fanuses of South Africa, too late for a generation lost to drink. For all the shit in this New South Africa, for all the complaints that the country is going to the dogs, at least for the likes of the Lategans their children have free schooling. At least Fanus’s children will have more of a chance, won’t be ground down with crap work and drink.

  Oh yeh? His child is dead, Jake all but shouts. Look, Fanus has more reason to despise me, he says, for having made nothing of my so-called advantage. But I’m glad, do you hear me, I’m glad I left, that I didn’t take the money that the old bastard—and he puts on a solemn, sanctimonious voice—scrimped and saved and sacrificed himself for. Control freak—obedience and gratitude weren’t enough, we had to be his clones. Siss! Puffed up with his own pathetic achievement, with the bloody old bootstraps ballad. Siss! What a pity he didn’t just support Fanus instead, but no, he was fixed on the idea of family that he could mold in his own form, the filthy old hypocrite. Dirty vark. May he squirm in his grave. May the worms gorge themselves and puke in disgust.

  Mercia hangs her head. She cannot bear it. She shuts her eyes against the image of their father’s face that drifts up into her vision. The dead old man’s disgrace, like a swarm of blowflies, has invaded her body, so that every organ buzzes with shame. She hears again his voice, the ardent prayer to be a good God-fearing father, and the words he so often quoted: Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David his father. Holy, filial love, that was what he set store by. She feels a rush of pity, which she knows to keep to herself. How Nicholas has let himself down.

  As if he senses her pity, Jake says, Listen to me: he was evil. When he brought me back here to Kliprand—I was in bad shape then—he might as well have put that bitch on a platter for me. Oh yes, he said we’d have to get someone in to help. Sylvie this and Sylvie that, and she was wonderful. My legs were swollen; I couldn’t walk, but oh Sylvie was the one with healing hands. So she nursed me back to health with her massages and her chicken soup and thereafter her boerefuckingwors and homemade ginger beer. All his doing. What kind of father is that, passing to me his leftovers when I’m on my knees? Dirty bastards.

  Jake turns away in disgust, gropes for the bottle, from which he takes a draining swig, and announces that he is off to bed, that she should go, far away from him and his dirty mess. Drained as Mercia feels, she reminds him of his word. She’ll drive him to Dr. Swemmers; he can have a sleep while they wait to be seen, and she says nothing of the rehabilitation clinic where she hopes he’ll be able to go that night. Jake nods. He is too tired to resist; he’ll do anything. He does not question her fumbling in a drawer for clean pajamas, tossing his things into a shopping bag.

  Mercy, he says, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have written. I wanted to keep all this from you.

  Jake is shaking; his bleary eyes are awash. Mercia knows what it has taken for him to tell. She puts her arms around him and his head drops on her shoulder. Sweetheart, my poor sweetheart, she says, and is alarmed to hear in her own voice that of the woman on the bus ride to Edinburgh. Poor Jake, she revises, over and over as she leads him to the car, bundles him into the seat.

  Mercia swithers about Fanus. Should she speak to him, perhaps even meet up with him? The awkwardness of their teens is still there, a ghostly guilt, but there is always the possibility that he has invented it all, for reasons so base that she knows it to be a foolish hope. Still, she would prefer to hear for herself the story, find out his source (has Sylvie told him?), and check for herself how Fanus has, as one does, translated it through his own history. So that she in turn can retranslate it through her cloud of shame and pity? Oh, she doesn’t know; she is tired of speculations.

  There is no question of speaking to Sylvie directly, and that is that. She has not rung the girl, and Sylvie would not expect to hear from her until later that day. But it is her responsibility to ascertain as best she can what really happened. The sins of the father have to be borne, but Mercia cannot bear the girl to know that she knows.

  Fanus, though, will have nothing to do with that responsibi
lity. When she looks up his number in the directory and calls to ask whether she could meet with him, he is clipped, firm. He does not beat about the bush. If it’s about Sylvie, he says, yes, he knows he has spoken out of turn; he is sorry, he should not have said anything to Jake.

  It was cruel, he concedes, but now that he has spoken, there is no more to be said. He wants nothing further to do with it, with them. It is the Murrays’ business, not his. Still, he hopes she is well and that Jake is recovering. He heard he was ill.

  Fanus’s civility is cutting. Is there no possibility of checking whether, having spoken out of bitterness, he is not now brazening it out? of asking how he knows? But Mercia knows that it is the truth. There is no need to ask, to invite unsavory detail. Perhaps she has hoped to see him for her own purposes, to put behind her the guilt of the past? Now she must choose to believe that Fanus is indeed interested in Jake’s health. She gushes, tells him how lucky they’ve been. Did he know the new sanatorium only eight kilometers out on the N road going north? Well, there was a bed available and Dr. Swemmers managed to get Jake admitted that very afternoon. She, Mercia, has just returned, and yes it won’t be easy the next few weeks, but at least she knows that he is in good hands. Jake has after all done it before, recovered from alcoholism.

  Yes, Jake is lucky to have you home, lucky to not rely on state resources, Fanus says, and wishes her good night.

  Sylvie, the precocious child, is fearless. The child of three mothers and no father pays little heed to the old women’s sighing and complaining. She keeps out of their way. Out of their sight she practices theatrical laughter. There is plenty to keep her amused as she prises her way into the world that they try to keep at bay. She thinks nothing of crawling under fences, climbing over gates, tearing her pinafore across barbed wire, dismissing the bark of dogs with a mocking woof-woof. The soles of her feet, tough as leather, withstand all but the most vicious of thorns. As for the common, multisided thorn, she brushes that off without wincing. Sylvie is the tomboy who shares with Meester a love of sheep, who as a child ran along to help him herd them into the old concrete dipkraal where he clipped their ears. Sylvie did not fear the stern man as other children did; she held out her hand for him to take, to help her skip across a runnel, a man whose own children were somewhere far away, so that there was no obstacle to swinging the little one onto his shoulders, a child so eager and old-fashioned for her years. Or perhaps that was how he preferred to think of her.

  One afternoon, having scaled the chicken-wire fence at the end of the lane, Sylvie found one of Meester’s ewes. The sheep teetered drunkenly, bleated bitterly as if in pain, before collapsing in the sand. Blood came from her rear, and the child watched fascinated, saw that the ewe was in the throes of giving birth. Under the animal’s smooth coat was the unmistakable shape-shifting of a creature desperate to get out, so that Sylvie instinctively played the midwife. She tugged at the tiny, slippery hooves, and helped the lamb to find its way out as the mother shuddered her last breath. With the lamb cradled in her arms she rushed to Meester’s house. He dribbled milk into its mouth, and together they drove off for a baby’s bottle and teat for Hansie. Meester said she could have it—the orphaned hanslam with its adorable black head and hooves—as her very own.

  Sylvie held the lamb tenderly in her arms as she fed the little thing, its tail wagging with pleasure. AntieMa said she was not to call the lamb her baby; it was old-fashioned, sinful even, for a girl to think of having a baby. But having delivered the lamb, having seen it all, Sylvie didn’t care. She knew she was Hansie’s mummy, and better than the rag doll that Ousie had made for her, he loved her loudly with a plaintive baa. And she made sure to report to Meester about Hansie’s antics.

  Sylvie did not say anything to Meester about Blinkoog, the orphaned kid that Oom Hansie had given her when she was only six. Then her mothers complained, tried to return the gift, but so pitifully did the child wail that they gave in. When Blinkoog was barely a fully grown goat, Ousie sold her to the butcher, for how would they keep her fed in the winter months? Blinkoog’s was not a story to be told.

  Why, Sylvie asked, was the old dipkraal there, why did they no longer dip the sheep?

  Meester said that all had changed, that the fat-tailed Afrikaner sheep, prone to blowflies, needed antiseptic dips in late spring. Now, in the modern days, the old Afrikaners, herded for centuries by Hottentots, were no longer farmed. No, he laughed, just as we colored people have made progress—we no longer need the fat rumps of the Hottentots to see us through the lean months—better sheep are being bred, ones that don’t succumb to pests and disease. Meester explained the crossing of Blackhead Persians with the Horned Dorset, and how the new Dorper breed was chosen from those with black heads and white bodies. And that Sylvie should not like some backward, uneducated people think that this went against God’s will. Oh no, it was clear that God had sanctioned the breeding. Dorpers were Chosen Sheep. Chosen for this arid veld where they’d eat anything, chosen for their fecundity, and for being such good mothers. Besides, they did not need shearing, and even the rich sheep farmers were no longer interested in wool. Who needs wool when people prefer the new, more convenient fabrics like nylon? The Dorpers grew so fast, and their mutton was so good, that clearly the breeding had been sanctioned by God.

  Sylvie had no fear of contradicting Meester. She did not think that Hansie’s mother had tried hard enough. Without her, Sylvie, the old ewe would have kicked the bucket without caring about the baby desperate to get out. Also, nature had not always done so well by the Dorper. Look she said, how their coats are shed in early summer. She laughed, pointing at the weird-looking old ram who was kept tethered away from the ewes. His woolen hair had fallen out from the legs upward, and what remained was a tattered karos that seemed to have been flung carelessly over his back, making him look ugly and foolish. Not ugly at all, Meester said, involuntarily patting the bald patch at the back of his own head. Mother Nature knows what’s good for him, and I daresay there’s a beauty in such a practical arrangement when it’s still cool in the evenings, and something flung over the shoulders is just what he needs until the temperature is right. Then he’ll shed the last of the wool and look as handsome and dignified as any shorn ram.

  How the child loved to hear Meester’s stories about sheep. Sheep, he said, were the favored animals in the Bible. On the Day of Judgment, when the Son of Man comes in all his glory, he will separate the nations, one from another as sheep are separated, and he will place the sheep at his right hand.

  So, will goats be cursed, will they weep and gnash their teeth? she asked. Meester wasn’t clear about that. He shook his head and tutted; he said it just wasn’t worth bothering with the less advanced creatures. These Namaqua people won’t develop until they give up goats. He may have started out with goats but it is clear that Dorper sheep are the way forward. Sylvie understood that Meester did not include her in the backward people, and to show her discernment she reminded him of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. She would know the difference, she said confidently; she was no Red Riding Hood.

  She liked hearing Meester’s story of the foolish Dutch king, William of Orange, who sent the first woolly merinos to South Africa—that’s how they landed here—and then the next year asked for them back because, he claimed, they had been sent in error. What kind of king was that who changed his mind? Or who made mistakes and then thought the act could be undone? And now, who needed merinos when scientific knowledge had produced the Dorper?

  The child quipped, Who needed kings? Perhaps kings, like merinos, were out of fashion. That’s why they didn’t have a king in South Africa. But Meester said that that was going too far, too immoderate. That a grand country like England had a queen. Which was altogether a different matter. The child could imagine being a queen with a shiny crown, one who would never make a mistake.

  Sylvie would not for all the world miss the slaughtering of a sheep in Meester’s yard. Then she would hold one of the hind legs and watch hi
m wield the sharp knife skillfully, score just beneath the skin, before kneading with a fist so that the flesh gave way cleanly, separating with a warm sighing sound from its skin. Meester said she could take home some intestines, trotters, and a couple of neck chops for her mothers, also fat for kaiings, all in exchange for scraping the stomach into clean tripe, and Ousie said that the Lord would bless Meester for his kindness.

  Please, Sylvie begged AntieMa after school, please could she go with Meester and the boys to the veld, where they would gather melkbos for winter feed. She would take along a bag for collecting wood, and Ousie said yes, that it was good of Meester to take an interest in her. Perhaps he would help to put her through college one day. Yes, Sylvie said, echoing Meester, education was the only way out of backwardness. But Sylvie did not care about days in a distant future. Scampering into the world before sunrise, she loved each day as it broke in a rosy glow, loved being in the open veld with the vast blue dome overhead. She leapt with the boys onto the back of Meester’s bakkie, helped for a while with gathering and chopping melkbos, then would wander off looking for birds’ eggs, chasing after unfamiliar goggas, or sat stock still in the valleys, listening to strange animal cries cutting through the silence.

  And as the girl grew hips and breasts under the old check shirt and cumbersome skirt, as she leapt tomboyish onto the back of the bakkie, AntieMa and Ousie and Nana did not think of protecting her against Meester, who after all was like a father to the child. Besides, they thought that the younger boys, Jakkie and Kytou, always went along, were picked up on the way. Had Sylvie not told them so? They did not imagine that alone, away in the secluded kloofs with only sheep to keep an eye, Meester might one day see that the child was no longer a child, that she had grown hips and breasts, and that perhaps she no longer wanted him as a father.