The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s horrible if she doesn’t love him. Imagine it, Robert.’

  ‘It happens all the time with arranged marriages. But that’s all coming to an end now. Mponda’s baptism spells the end of treating women like things.’

  The rebuke in her hazel-flecked eyes hurt him. She asked unexpectedly, ‘Remember that dreadful man Bullock? What were the rumours he taunted you with?’

  Robert felt as though he had been punched. He said, ‘Ruth fell in love with Bullock’s predecessor, a man who was nothing like him … younger, kinder. She may have been trying to join him when she ran off.’

  Clara was speechless for a moment. ‘You didn’t say a word about this when we talked about her.’

  He was sweating freely. ‘Some things are best forgotten.’

  ‘I don’t agree. It would have comforted me a lot to know she didn’t mean to die.’

  ‘I felt too humilated to be honest with you.’ He waited for another humbling blow, but her expression softened.

  ‘What happened to the man?’ she asked, almost kindly.

  ‘He was recalled by the Colonial Office, and Bullock took his place. He’d been his deputy.’

  When she murmured, ‘Poor Robert,’ he sensed he had grown smaller in her eyes.

  He went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of brandy, which to Clara’s amazement he drained in a couple of swallows. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have married again,’ he muttered, searching her face anxiously for a hint of denial. ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. But when you explained to me about your mother’s death, I couldn’t help myself. I thought: I can actually do something for this lovely girl. She longs to regain her faith. Perhaps I can restore it to her.’

  Clara’s cheeks were flushed with anger. ‘You married me to save me?’

  ‘No, no. I worshipped you … almost blasphemously. I wanted you with me all the time. It wasn’t only selfishness. Your life was empty – you said that yourself. You hungered for a purpose. I believed the simple life here would bring you back to God.’

  ‘Oh, Robert, Robert,’ she cried, ‘what on earth does that mean? Perhaps I only wanted to have my mother back again – not my faith at all.’

  He sighed heavily. ‘Hasn’t Mponda’s conversion made any difference to you?’

  ‘It’s made me frightened for him. The rebels won’t give up.’

  Clara thought of Countess Nina and her husband. She had failed to tell them about the rifles or about any of her fears. Until Paul’s murder had thrust reality in her face, she had denied common sense and even ordinary notions of duty to others. If she could only reach the two of them and tell them everything, they would be able to protect themselves. But the count and countess might as well be on the moon, for all her chances of reaching them.

  *

  Later that week, on an oppressive afternoon, indigo clouds piled up on the horizon, while lightning flickered fitfully. Clara had observed similar formations many times before and had come to see them as examples of nature’s playfulness rather than real auguries of rain. As she walked into the village, Herida was being dragged between the huts by a brutal-looking man, who struck her repeatedly. Clara shouted at him, and he spun around, momentarily releasing his grip. Herida fled. Pursuit did not occur to her persecutor, who was big and clumsy.

  The sky was closing down like a black ceiling as Clara hurried after her friend. A shattering detonation reverberated across the heavens. A sigh of wind heralded a distant hissing sound. While Clara followed Herida towards the mission, a splatter of isolated raindrops rapidly became a thick curtain of water. Clara was soaked within moments. Joyful children splashed in and out of puddles between the huts. The air felt miraculously cool.

  As Clara approached the veranda, two women burst from the house. They were locked together, hands grasping for advantage, wrenching and scratching at each other. On the edge of the veranda, they tripped and fell into the mud. One of the women wore a long, opulent garment that had become split across the back, while the other, who seemed to have been dressed more scantily to start with, was naked. This other was Herida. Mission ‘children’ ran out. People from the village pushed through the fence to watch. There were gasps of amazement as they identified the combatants. Queen Chizuva held the advantage for a moment before Herida rolled on top of her, bare bottom uppermost. She brought her thighs down on each side of Chizuva’s torso, straddled her, and then plastered handfuls of mud into her eyes and mouth.

  ‘Steal my husband,’ she yelled.

  ‘Insult the queen?’ choked Chizuva, arching her back and managing to grab Herida’s hair. Then she dragged her down and bit deeply into her shoulder. Herida screamed, and the crowd cheered.

  Philemon hobbled forward and tried to get between the women, ending up on his rear for his pains.

  ‘Ladies, ladies – are you mad?’

  ‘She stole my husband,’ cried Herida.

  ‘He’s mine!’ shrieked Chizuva.

  Both women’s faces were torn and bleeding. Herida was trying to cover her nakedness with a filthy scrap of cloth.

  ‘Do not bring shame on yourselves,’ pleaded Philemon, horribly embarrassed. He tried to grasp Herida’s arm, but she pulled away.

  ‘My new man uses me like a baboon,’ sobbed Herida. ‘In and out of me twenty times a day.’

  ‘Silence!’ implored the old preacher.

  Having said her piece, the nganga’s daughter limped away towards the gate. Clara pursued her through the rain, her feet slipping on the greasy layer of thin mud that covered the entire path. She walked beside Herida for a while before reaching out a hand.

  ‘Are you angry with me, Mrs Robert?’

  ‘No.’

  Herida surprised her with a tearful smile. ‘I had to hit her.’

  In answer, Clara squeezed her hand. They were very close to the house now.

  *

  Robert knelt down in his pitch-dark kitchen and thanked God for the rain. Mponda would be the hero of the hour. Even Clara would see the change. The missionary lit a lamp and crossed to the stove. The sound of the rain hitting the thatch was extraordinarily loud. He used up half a candle in lighting the fire, so much water was coming down the chimney.

  When Clara returned, her green dress was clinging to her body and her face glistened. She stood in the doorway emptying her shoes, and Robert’s throat tightened; she looked sleek and sinuously lovely in her soaking dress. As Robert moved towards her, smiling tenderly, Herida stepped into the room. His mouth hung open. She was stark naked and covered with mud.

  ‘What are you doing here, child?’ Robert’s voice was breathless with reproof.

  Clara said firmly, ‘She can’t go back to that brute.’

  ‘Moeti is the chief’s brother.’

  ‘I don’t care who he is. I saw him hit her.’

  Rain was dripping through the thatch on to the dung floor, liberating a farmyard smell. Robert fetched a towel and wrapped it around Herida to make her decent. ‘Why did he hit you?’

  ‘Because I ran away. He touches me all the time – my breasts, under my apron. I feel sore from him.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll tire of you as soon as he’s more familiar.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Robert,’ cried Clara. ‘She doesn’t love him, and he wants her body all the time.’

  He let out a long sigh. ‘I’ll talk to Mponda. Of course I will.’

  ‘She stays here till then,’ said Clara. Meanwhile Herida stood in front of the stove as if in heaven. Later, Clara bandaged her shoulder and sat with her.

  Across the room, Simon was ironing sheets. The smell of the warm linen and the spicy tang of a relish he had made from caterpillars and herbs created an atmosphere of ordered homeliness. Outside in the lane, frogs were croaking loudly – snoring, as Simon aptly described the noise.

  Herida stayed in the house that night and the next. When her new husband had first beaten her, she had run into the bush and slept there among
the ‘things of the night’. Since these included spirits as well as wild beasts, Clara realized how truly wretched Herida must have felt.

  ‘You were mad to take such risks,’ she whispered.

  Herida’s lids drooped. ‘My love hurts me badly. I fitted so well with Mponda; he was not too heavy for me, nor too light, and our bloods sang. Moeti crushes my life out every time he gets on me. Why am I treated like this?’ Great tears formed in her eyes.

  Clara could think of no reason why such a graceful, loving person should receive anything but respect. Yet Robert said that Herida’s marriage to Moeti had been according to tribal rites and she ought not to have deserted him. They were on their way to bed, and Robert’s tone was almost pleading.

  ‘Please don’t think I’m not sorry for her. But if pagans start to jettison traditional obligations, they’ll take concubines instead of wives. We mustn’t undermine their tribal rules until Christian morality is widespread. Think what will be said if we encourage her to desert Moeti.’

  He had spoken so gently that Clara did not stop him when he ran his hands over her breasts. What could she ever suffer at his hands in comparison with Herida’s daily ordeals?

  A few days later, there was a break in the rains, and the sun shone. The yard was a muddy morass, alive with frogs and millipedes. Birds twittered in every thorn tree and swooped down upon the hosts of insects emerging from the earth. Now that new grass was growing, the oxen had been driven in from the cattle posts. Robert and Clara savoured the astonishingly pungent smell of the damp earth as they walked into the fields to watch the men driving their teams, with their wives behind, guiding the ploughs. In less than a week, blackened shambas and dusty hillsides had become as green as English fields. In dusty places, where nothing had flourished before, children were collecting mushrooms.

  ‘We thank Thee, O Lord, for bringing new life and hope to our world,’ declaimed Robert, with uplifted palms.

  The villagers were building shelters close to their gardens, and many would remain there until harvest time, hoeing weeds and scaring away birds and beasts. The pale smoke of cooking fires rose in blue columns. Close to the path, an old woman was digging holes with a tiny hoe and sowing maize seed picked from a precious cob.

  Yet the scene did not bring Clara happiness, for she was thinking of Herida’s tulip-petal skin suffering at the hands of her grotesque man – a suffering that would begin again if she went ‘home’.

  That evening, when Robert was leaving the mission, he was confronted by the lumbering bulk of Moeti, with a rhino whip in his hand. Robert sprang away, but Moeti caught him on the back of the calves, inflicting three raised welts. Even before this assault, Robert had wanted Herida to leave his house. Now he was determined that she should do so soon. Whenever he went to the mission, Chizuva subjected him to a fierce tirade for allowing her attacker to stay under his roof.

  Robert consulted Mponda that Sunday after an open-air service on the khotla. Could the chief, please, speak to Moeti and tell him to treat Herida more kindly? With two other wives, surely he could satisfy his appetites with them for a while and give Herida a rest? To Robert’s relief, Mponda was genuinely distressed by Herida’s unhappiness. As he bowed his head, Robert could almost feel the weight his broad back was already carrying.

  Mponda placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder and said sorrowfully, ‘Umfundisi, I am sorry he hit you. But would you be glad if I told you not to sleep with your wife and took her to my house to live?’

  Robert blushed. ‘If you explained why my attentions displeased her, I would thank you for your advice.’

  Mponda smiled fondly, like an older, wiser brother. ‘Moeti is not like you, Umfundisi. Perhaps he will hurt you again. He will go around saying that you won’t let men sleep with their wives. Do you want to give him that big stick to beat us? Send Herida back to him. Do it for my sake and for your sake.’

  ‘You must give me a few days.’

  Robert knew he had no choice. The mission would lose many adult pupils if husbands ever gained the impression that their wives, learning there, might never return home. So Herida would have to return to her husband soon. But how could this decision be broken to Clara without his earning her lasting anger?

  *

  Despite the rains, no maize would be harvested for several months, and people still came to the mission for food. In the past, Clara had always been upset by this daily trickle of pathetic supplicants, but Herida told her not to be sentimental.

  ‘How do some people manage to make their grain last through a long drought?’ she demanded, putting down the piece of cloth she had been cutting.

  ‘Maybe they had more to start with.’

  Herida shook her head vehemently. ‘They eat less and think ahead. Some people even eat their seed corn.’ She pulled an imbecilic face to illustrate what she thought of such folly.

  Clara suspected that Herida might be more sympathetic if she herself had ever encountered such a fate. One afternoon, a long-faced man came to the mission and bowed humbly as he watched Clara unwrapping dried dates.

  He opened his eyes very wide. ‘Dear me! How clever white people are! What a lot they eat. Are these the delicious sweet things I have heard so much about?’

  ‘They are not delicious,’ Herida announced. ‘They taste like dung, and we give them to our goats.’

  When he shuffled away empty-handed, Clara felt dreadful. ‘So cruel of you! He was only trying to please.’

  Herida imitated him brilliantly: ‘“Dear me! What is that food which clever white people have?”’ She laughed loudly. ‘I hate fawning. Don’t you?’ And when she came to think of it, Clara had to admit that Herida was right. She did dislike the beggars who fawned.

  Herida helped Clara in many ways and never stopped telling her interesting facts of a kind that Robert would never have thought it proper to mention, such as how a polygamous husband behaved at night.

  ‘Does he wait till the wife he starts with has gone to sleep before going on to the next?’

  ‘Unless he wants trouble, he waits.’

  ‘There’s open jealousy between the women?’

  ‘Eeayay! You can’t imagine, Mrs Robert. When Mponda used to leave Chizuva’s hut for mine, he first waited for her to sleep. But sometimes she pretended, so when he got up, she grabs him. “Where are you going?” “To piss.” When he comes back, later, she pretends to wake up – she never went to sleep. “Dearest, make love to me. But why does your penis dangle like a baby’s? You didn’t piss. You screwed Herida.” And she starts wailing.’

  From Herida, Clara also learned about the male initiation ceremonies. How after the circumcisions all the foreskins were collected and burned, and their ashes mixed with semen and herbs, so the next generation of young men could be anointed. ‘The semen must be fresh, so two men make it together.’ Herida said such things in the same matter-of-fact way that she explained rubbing bats’ dung into her labia to make them as long as bats’ wings. Widows often had other women come and slip their fingers into their vaginas to relieve their frustration. Even wives whose husbands were away at the cattle posts would do the same. Clara tried to imagine such things being mentioned in Sarston. People would faint at the very idea.

  Clara no longer found it odd to enjoy being with a young woman who smoked hemp in a small wooden pipe and believed that bats’ dung improved her genitals. Herida could spit, very discreetly, an astonishing distance. She had sparkle, charm, and intelligence. And because Herida knew that Clara had begged for her father’s life on the khotla, she adored and trusted her. She particularly loved to quiz her about English ladies. Did the grandest ones really do nothing? Couldn’t they make a pot or plaster a wall? ‘Poor things,’ she said, chuckling. Herida’s laughter made Clara lighthearted too. She made up her mind to teach her English and imagined taking her to England on Robert’s next furlough. What would Herida make of dressmakers and trams? She would look marvellous in an elegant fitted outfit. But this was a private fantasy Cl
ara shared with no one.

  Every afternoon, currents of warm air boiled up from the land, forming storm clouds, which in due course emptied themselves on the valley with spectacular effect. After such storms, Robert always went to examine his dam, checking that no damage had been done. What he had dreamed about had come to pass: a lake had formed, almost a mile long and half a mile wide. Fishermen were scrabbling about in the shallows, digging into the earth. Watching them, Robert marvelled at God’s goodness. The Almighty had caused fish to burrow into the mud of the drying riverbed, so that now, months later, villagers could dig them out alive when food was needed most. Thank you, Lord.

  His eye followed the sweep of a fish eagle’s descent. In some elephant grass, no more than a hundred paces away, Robert’s astonished gaze fell upon a Matabele warrior. His stillness was so extraordinary that it was several seconds before Robert grasped what he was seeing. He too kept as still as he knew how. The man had apparently gone down to the water to drink and was leaving now. He wore a traditional black head-ring and carried a short assegai. Robert could not have been more shocked if he had seen Ruth’s ghost. The Venda usually hid in their rock caves and blocked all the entrances the moment any Matabele were reported within fifty miles of their villages. Something very strange was happening. Since the warrior exhibited no particular wariness, Robert guessed he could not be alone. Should he warn Mponda at once? In his confusion, he hardly knew what he feared more: that Mponda should know that the Matabele were here, or that he should be entirely ignorant of their presence. Robert swung around in alarm. Light footfalls were coming from behind him.

  ‘You must be very proud,’ said Clara, gazing at the lake.

  ‘We must leave,’ he whispered.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’

  He told her that he had seen an armed warrior in the grass, which was an unusual sight by the dam. He did not mention that the man had been a Matabele. ‘He may be quite harmless, but we mustn’t take risks.’

  Robert was desperate to see Mponda, although he feared that the chief’s first question would be: ‘Have you sent Herida back to my brother?’ Entering the village, Robert took a deep breath and turned to Clara. ‘Do you know how long Herida expects to stay with us?’