October

by Zoe Wicomb

  No, he was not her father. For Nicholas, the days of fathering were over, his children gone. He took her hand; he would show her a protected bower where the thorn trees clumped together on the bank of the dry riverbed. He told her to unbutton her shirt and free her new breasts, small as green apples. He spoke in a new voice, which the girl knew had grown deep and hoarse for her alone, of the beauty of the body, of her breasts. The delicious warmth of sin glowed purple through the dappled leaves, through the crown of thorns above, coursing through her new body.

  Sylvie had been taught not to undress completely, to wash herself in AntieMa’s darkened room with a cloth and a basin of warm water, one part of the body at a time, the rest kept decently covered, and her skirt not to be removed at all. Under the trees with the dappled light on her breasts, she stretched out her arms and thrilled at the warm air lapping at her bare skin like so many tongues, thrilled at the pleasure of being looked at and admired. Meester said that God had made Eve to be adored and looked at by Adam in all her naked beauty, that there was nothing for Sylvie to fear.

  It was Oom Hansie sawing under the thorn tree who put down his tools as Sylvie tried to slip by. He mumbled that it was too hot an afternoon for the veld, that she would be better off resting under the tree. It was hoeka time for coffee, could she not make him a mug of coffee? It was better for Meester to send a man to look for sheep; he, Oom Hansie, would be happy to go after they’d had a little chat over a mug of coffee. He had some ginger biscuits in his bag.

  Sylvie laughed. Oom Hansie was an old man who hammered and sawed and dozed in the afternoons under the tree. Who did not talk. What did he know about sheep? No, she lied, she was waiting for Kytou and Jakkie; they would be branding the new lambs today.

  Why, she asked her mothers, does Oom Hansie sit at their gate? Could they not tell him to go? Ousie said that there was no reason why he should not, that he worked with his hands, and actually it wasn’t their gate. The large old thorn tree belonged to everyone, and even if he were a foolish man, Sylvie should be careful not to be rude. Oom Hansie should always, at all times, be treated with obedience and respect. Meester agreed with Sylvie that Oom Hansie would not be able to run after sheep, and that the sheep would not respond to his call, as they did to hers, her magical tok-tok-tok which always made them turn their heads.

  What else was there for Sylvie to do after school? Even the homework took her no time at all. The previous day part of the flock had not returned to the kraal and Meester relied on her to come along to find them. Then they would clip the ears of the new lambs, in case they strayed into the Boer’s adjoining camp. Oh, Sylvie ached to be alone in the veld with Meester, who said she was clever and beautiful. He knew everything about plants, about the red earth, the minimal variations in the vygies; he alerted her to the drones of insects, the paths washed by rare rainwater, the clouds in the sky with their fancy names.

  Say after me, he said in English: cumulus, cirrus, stratus, and she said after him, as he stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders, steering her to the east. He relied on her sharp eyesight. There, he said, look to that ridge. Are those not sheep on the horizon? Then as she squinted into the sun, his hands slipped down onto the brand-new breasts. So that was what they were for. His fingers were like the tapered flutes of Jan Twakkie flower at the edge of the dry vlei, bright against the blue sky. And she loved his words, spoken like a dominee, hoarsely: I have come in sin. I must ask for forgiveness, but you are so beautiful, so very beautiful, and his voice, his body, trembled with appreciation for her. What did she care about silly old sin that AntieMa trotted out on Sundays? She had a new, quivering body and here was Meester, her very own father, dressed in sin, ready to attend to that body.

  I am here for you alone, he said, and, steering her to their bower, unbuttoned her shirt, unbuttoned himself in the purple glow.

  Sylvie could see no wrong in it. No, she was proud to have an admirer in Meester; she was his precious whom he would not hurt. Her pressed hair was nothing to him; he said she was beautiful and brave and clever; he cared about her purity; he would guard her, he said, with his life.

  It was the meddling old man, Oom Hansie, who spoiled everything. Who knocked at the door and castigated AntieMa for her airs and graces and for allowing Meester to take advantage of the child. AntieMa, boiling with rage, ordered him off her premises, but when Sylvie came home she thrashed the girl, with the help of Nana, who held her arms pinned down. Sylvie would not confess to anything, but she was barred from going to the veld, and from that day her mothers kept a strict eye on her. But oh, she found ways of seeing him. She would walk miles, wait for him under the thorn trees with breasts bared in the purple light of sin.

  Neither her mothers nor Oom Hansie said anything to Meester. Years later, Sylvie wondered why they hadn’t, why they assumed that it was her, the child’s responsibility.

  It was Meester himself who, after many months of clandestine meetings in the veld, drove up alongside Sylvie one afternoon as she walked back from school. He sat stiffly in his seat, barely turning his head toward her to say that he had had a vision. He looked past her at the sky as if God were keeping an eye. God in all his glory, flanked by angels, had come to him in the night, spoken to him in a terrifying voice. They were not to meet again. Not ever again. God’s grace had thus far kept them out of trouble, but now He has spoken. She, Sylvie, should keep away from him, should no longer tempt him, lest her own soul be damned forever.

  Sylvie wept for weeks. She could not eat. She grew listless and frail, and failed her standard five exams. Her menses that had started only the previous month now would not stop. AntieMa said she was pure evil, that there was no question of her staying on at school. How lucky they were that old Lodewyk was prepared to employ her.

  Until the day she started in the butcher’s shop Sylvie believed that Meester would rescue her. For all God’s warning he was surely still her friend who had promised to protect her, but no word, not even a sign, came from him.

  What kind of God was he who interfered so cruelly?

  The answer: a cruel God. So that Sylvie owed him no allegiance. With her arms plunged into the alchemy of sausage meat, she stopped crying; she bought lipstick and cigarettes, took up her hems, and in tight jeans went dancing with boys from the high school. Her mothers shook their heads sadly. Why had they expected anything else? The sins of the fathers must after all be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations. But Sylvie would hear nothing of fathers. It was all too late, she said. Having three mothers suited her just fine; she had always appreciated their delicacy, so she hoped they would not now burden her with dreary stories, with fathers. AntieMa was outraged. How right they were to send her to the butchery. If it were not for her pride she would ask Lodewyk to thrash the girl, but Ousie said no, pride was also a good thing, and the girl would grow out of this rude phase.

  One night Sylvie drank a whole can of beer and allowed herself to be dragged off to the dipkraal by one of the Dirkse boys, who later boasted about his conquest. The truth was that although she had cast off all thoughts of Meester and God, by now a composite, her body would not obey. Much as Sylvie wanted to lose herself in the embraces of perfectly nice young men, her flesh revolted at the final act; she simply could not, not even after a second can of brave beer. Fortunately for her, none of the young men were prepared to say that he had failed, and so her reputation as a loose goose grew. She reveled in the role. A loose goose had privileges. A loose goose was allowed to hang out, smoking and drinking with men, slapping her tightly denimed thighs, and tilting her head back to crow with loud laughter. And if they went on a jaunt to Rooikrans, she leapt nimbly onto the back of a bakkie, standing all the way with her thumbs hooked in her jeans pockets, keeping a posed balance as the vehicle juddered over corrugated roads.

  Old Lodewyk too must have got wind of Sylvie’s looseness, for he lurched at her one day as she was preparing chops, a hand already groping at her shirt before she realized wh
at he was doing. How thrilling it was, the idea of raising the axe, of severing a hand cleanly, and watching warm red blood rush from the cut veins, watching it spill down the wooden block. Entranced she was, Sylvie the wild one, Sylvie the butcher, who would wrap the old, liver-spotted hand in newspaper that they kept for cheap cuts, and hand it to him. Then frightened by the vision she took the axe, held it aloft, and with her left fist shoved the old man away. There now, she said quietly, we wouldn’t want that bad old hand chopped off and parceled up as soup bones, would we?

  There was no question of old Lodewyk trying anything on with her again, but how that hand, those fingers seem to point at her, mocking the girl stuck in a butcher’s shop with an axe. That image of herself flickered on a rough wall; the Kool Kat talk with which she inflated herself echoed as if she were trapped in a cave; it was as the apostle said, all noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. At school, Sylvie had learned by heart the text in Corinthians, but where, she wondered, was the love the apostle spoke of? He might as well have spoken in the tongues he raged against, for she knew that there was no escape. Overhead the sun bludgeoned its way as it did every day across the unwavering blue of the sky. At three o’clock the easterly wind rose to sweep stinging sand across the dry plains. There was no escape.

  Ousie, sliding down heavily in her chair, held out a hairbrush at Sylvie, who brushed and plaited the thinning gray hair. Ousie carried a small shriveled potato in each pocket, but the arthritis in her arms and hands would not desist. As her mothers declined, Sylvie grew more tolerant of them. She choked on a lump in her throat when she caught herself humming along to Ousie’s hymn: Jesus sal a-al jou so-onde weg was, jou so-onde weg was . . . Was her life to be mapped out in the manner of her mothers? If there was no escape, the Kool Kat would at least resist for as long as she could.

  For a while she thought that escape had arrived in the shape of Fanus, with whom Sylvie became friends. Much older, more sophisticated than the milksops she had been seeing, the young men who sat hungover in church on Sundays, Fanus was wry and cynical and did not go to church. Which appealed to her.

  What a brilliant life of boerewors you’re managing here for yourself, he mocked, as she wrapped the sausage in greaseproof paper.

  Sylvie laughed; she knew they would be friends. She could talk to him about the dreariness of being trapped, of her fears of taking up the baton in the manner of a relay race from her mothers. But her mothers were content; they didn’t complain.

  No, Fanus said, they have God.

  So, should we try to find God? she asked. The sound of clanging cymbals rang an ominous note of God.

  Too late, he said. It’s no longer possible to get mixed up with superstition when there is a real world crying out for radical change. Fanus explained to her the work he was doing for the ANC, got her to help with distributing leaflets and organizing tea at meetings. For all his gravity, he understood her wildness, laughed at her loose-goose posturing, appreciated her need to dazzle on the dance floor, so that it seemed inevitable that they would drift into each other’s arms. But Fanus said she was too young; he spoke of his ambition to go to university one day. Which Sylvie understood as an excuse. He would go away and leave her behind in a butchery, so that she listened quietly, nodded respectfully, and sealed her heart. She should go to night school, he said, but Sylvie was fearful, skeptical of the benefits of schooling. She would rather not know things; knowing, she feared, was not all it was made out to be. We see but in a glass darkly, Sylvie quoted.

  Fanus said, nonsense, that she should put all that nonsense from the Bible behind her. Sylvie knew that he did not love her, would never love her. Once Fanus left she stopped leafleting and making tea for firebrands who failed to see the hands that served them.

  Sylvie thought of Ousie, who must have felt trapped, who had left, and then returned. Ousie, the mother, with a real live baby in her arms, refusing motherhood.

  Mercia puts the mobile in her handbag, looks about the room, and slinging the bag onto her shoulder, knows that she cannot stay there. Not in that house. Not in Kliprand. She does not have the courage or the strength to face Sylvie, but above all she cannot bear to be in that place. She has to get away. Grabbing her keys and computer she locks up and drives off. She should be in Cape Town before bedtime.

  At the petrol station she sends Sylvie a clipped text to say that Jake has been admitted to the clinic and that she, Mercia, is on her way to town. That she’ll be in touch. It may be shameful but she has to keep moving, get away from this place called home. She must not think of her father, will not be destroyed by him. He too is departed, is dead, thank God. Mercia need not brood over him and his actions. No need to go over their last days together. There can be no point in pondering over what it means to love, to have loved a man, a father who is capable of abusing another child. She has in any case no language for such an exercise, no escape route via metaphor. This crime—and the word brings a sharp pain—has to be fully faced, but she does not know how.

  He is dead; he is dead; he is dead, she says out loud. And she, Mercia, must live, will live, as long as she can get away. Out of Kliprand. Out of the country. For the moment Jake is being cared for, but she cannot think what to do about Sylvie. She does not want to see the girl, for in her heart Mercia can find not a scrap of the compassion that the girl undoubtedly deserves. Of course it is shameful, but vacillating between guilt and disgust, she does not know how to manage, how to fulfill her responsibility toward Sylvie. How will she conceal her revulsion? Oh, she knows that it has unfairly been transferred from Nicholas, but it is revulsion all the same. Somewhere in her heart she must find compassion for the child abused by an old man, but her heart is tired, recalcitrant, and will not do the mind’s bidding.

  A check—that will have to do, but later, all in good time. Right now Mercia does not want to think of them, her people. To live, she must think of a life elsewhere. Yes, she is driving to Cape Town, but she has to propel herself into another time, another country. She would rather think of the absence that is Craig.

  Throughout that cold summer in Glasgow Mercia had shivered in a coat, an unfashionable gray coat she had not worn for years, which she wrapped around herself, belted, to keep out the chill of being unloved—an actual chill—to keep pain from spilling out into everyday business. Was there no end to grieving? How long, she wondered impatiently, would she go on feeling sorry for herself?

  Mercia mulled over the many words and expressions for being abandoned, through a range from the hurtful “dumped” to the far-from-neutral “being left,” and settled for a euphemism that is also said of the dead. Craig had departed. At the time, she claimed that his departure came out of the blue, a bolt that struck at a perfectly happy relationship. Thus, if Craig’s departure came as a surprise, she had not been vigilant, had not kept a close enough eye on things or, even more distressing, had turned a blind eye to signs of his disaffection, for signs there must have been. Why, for instance, had she insisted on an Easter break by the sea when he so hated that kind of holiday?

  Now it strikes her as shameful that she, a woman devoted to the close reading of words and actions on the page, failed to keep track of events in her own life. Blinded by grief, and perhaps, she must confess, by the condition of having been left, for she has not always been able to separate the two, she has not arrived at an explanation for what happened.

  If the time has come to reexamine the preceding months, or as Mercia is forced to revise, the preceding decline, it must mean that she is recovering. So once more she picks over Craig’s departure as one does a scab, even as she fears from the previous, barely acquiescent flake that it is too soon, that blood will once again ooze, that a new scab will form to protect the wound, and so delay recovery. But the thinking person must press on. There is some satisfaction to be found in the crumbly bits willingly prised away from the healing wound to reveal queer new flesh that will grow accustomed to air and light, that must eventually merge with the old, leaving a barely
visible vestige of the injury. It would be prudent to stop there, to leave alone the rest that is not ready to be picked at. If she claimed at the time that her heart would never mend, it is the case that the scab is smaller, that there is less of a temptation to pick at it prematurely.

  The ready-made belief in time-will-heal is after all not to be scoffed at. One day, in its own time, the remnant scab too will depart, leave of its own accord, simply flake off unnoticed, and disappear, leaving in its place the shiny new skin. But Mercia cannot remember ever being caught out in that way. No, scabs are attention seekers. There is usually an eager itch that begs for a helping hand, even if it is premature, a false appeal. Thus the metaphor brings a warning: she must be careful in picking over their last months together. If she is committed to conscientious close reading there is also the danger of probing prematurely or too deeply for her own good. A woman of a certain age must be careful not to destroy herself.

  And neither will Mercia be destroyed by her father.

  Mercia had wanted Craig to go home with her, but he was adamant that the Cape was too far, too expensive, would take up too much time. He hated long flights so that she looked for somewhere closer where they could go for a week.

  Hell no, Craig said, who wants to laze at a resort for British tourists reddening in the sun, fanning themselves with the Daily Record? Do I need a holiday? Anyway, what’s wrong with the cottage on the Solway?

  It’s too cold. Besides, you don’t read the Daily Record and you are British, so . . .