David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  I try to imagine a woman who takes that kind of thing seriously—protocol and hierarchy, the saluting and standing to attention, the barking of orders, the uniform. Someone who sees no contradiction between military values and the goal of political freedom. Such a woman does presumably not rifle in her handbag for a lipstick, does not pause briefly before a passing mirror to tug at her skirt or pat her hair into shape. Or perhaps she does just that, taking pleasure in her double life as she dabs perfume on her pulse points before target practice. Just as others might pray to a God for safekeeping.

  David refuses to acknowledge my need to know more. He mutters about personal and professional lives running along quite separately, then, as if realising that that might not be the right thing to say, he waves his hand as if to delete. It would seem that there is in any case no point in discussing her clandestine career: things are in a state of transition; the army is in the process of redefining itself.

  So in the New South Africa militarised men and women will enter civic positions without declaring themselves as the military? I ask.

  What else can we do, he shrugs. Such lives that have always, necessarily, been wrapped in secrecy can’t be unwrapped at this stage. Besides, what’s wrong with military values? See how far it’s brought us all, including the likes of you, who believe in keeping your hands clean at all costs, who reach for lace handkerchiefs at the thought of bloodshed, and choose not to notice that that fine thing, freedom, is rudely shoved through by rough guys in khaki.

  I do not defend this presentation of myself, or of freedom.

  A fine word, hey, he smirks, li-be-ra-tion, beating out the syllables with his fist on the table. And fine people just prefer to believe such nonsense as the Cry Freedom vision of schoolkids bursting into spontaneous rebellion over the Afrikaans language. Get real, old girl, without a military movement orchestrating the whole thing there would not and could not have been a Soweto ’76. Brilliant, isn’t it, how your arty lot just love these lies about irrepressible human nature and the spirit of freedom bubbling in the veins of the youth.

  Yes, I say—I am miffed at being called old girl; is there no such thing as a young woman over thirty?—but that’s no reason for keeping up the lies. That surely is the point: you start with secrets and lies as you have to, you do things that aren’t nice, as I suppose you have to, and then before you know it’s just second nature—military values that go against the very notion of freedom for which you originally set out to fight. Does Dulcie approve of these kind of lies?

  David shakes his head in disbelief. Look, forget it; it’s not nice, he mimicks. Let’s remember that you’d be the last person I’d come to for a political discussion. All you need to know is that there is nothing irregular between myself and Dulcie. She is not pretty, you know, not feminine, not like a woman at all.

  As with the preservation of all prejudices, he will no doubt go on clocking exceptions rather than question the stereotype and its rules. How many exceptions does an intelligent person have to come across before he sees that it is the definition of the category itself that is wanting? But I won’t discuss womanhood with him, won’t be lured into another subject. Since there is little to go by other than disconnected images, snippets of Dulcie, I must put things together as best I can, invent, and hope that David’s response will reveal something.

  Dulcie recognises the stinging sensation in the bridge of her nose as one that signals the desire to cry. One that converts the recognition of danger into a curious amalgam of fearlessness and terror, triggering another signal that ensures that she will not cry. She associates it with the dust of the playground where boys in school uniform dance mockingly around her, tug at her gymslip of which only the patches are in the right shade of blue, and chant Dulcie-pulcie-kroeskop-poeskop. It was then, as they rhymed her blackness with her cunt, that she bit back the tears and discovered the strength in her thin arms and legs that sent the little shits flying one by one into the dust, even if her gymslip got torn to shreds. Those limbs, since built into solid trunks of muscle, are still activated by a stinging in the nose.

  The men in balaclavas come like privileged guests into her bedroom, in the early hours, always entering the house by different routes, ridiculing her reinforced bolts and locks, the secret code of her Securilarm system. She wakes up and with every sense aquiver, mentally follows them over the fence, along the garden path, through the chosen window. Bessie, her old dog who barked feebly on their very first visit, was summarily shot. Now they come without a sound, but the stinging in the bridge of her nose precedes conscious knowledge of their arrival. So that her sleeping body bolts upright as she waits the long seconds for fear to metamorphose. Then she arranges herself on her back with her eyes open, her hands folded behind her head, looking straight ahead at the door—she has moved her bed for this purpose—where a polite knock will be followed by the gentle turning of the handle, as if they do not wish to disturb her.

  Each time a kindergarten rhyme jingles in her ears, mingles with the smell of dust:

  Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick

  So she called for the doctor to be quick, quick, quick

  The doctor came with his hat and his bag

  And he knocked at the door with a rat-a-tat-tat.

  Dulcie has never had a real doll.

  For the occasion of the school concert she took along a length of evenly stuffed nylon stocking. The head was shaped by a throttle of tied string; eyes and nose were marked out with blobs of blue ballpoint pen, red pen for the mouth. Standing in line with other girls, Dulcie rocked the length of doll to the rhythm of the Miss Polly song; the boy whose jaw she had later broken was the doctor.

  For a while, in her teens, as she pulled a stocking over her hair, she had the grotesque image of herself as Miss Polly with infant’s skin stretched like a caul over her head. Which may have led to her losing the desire for straightened hair.

  One of them carries a doctor’s Gladstone bag filled with peculiar instruments and electrical leads. Occasionally a real doctor is brought along. He is uncomfortable in the balaclava and the black tracksuit, from which his white hands dangle pathetically; his movements are stilted, reluctant, shot through with self-hatred. He keeps his eyes averted, does not speak, but shame leaks from his fingertips into her wounds. Sometimes in the delirium of pain she wishes to say something soothing, comforting, for she knows that he does not understand the ways of the world, the ugly secrets of war, that he has stumbled upon them without warning, without training. But she cannot trust the words to come out unmangled. Out of delicacy she does not speak, remains dry-eyed. One day she will weep like a gargoyle. Tears will fountain from every orifice, including the man made ones, washing away the grimy contact, washing her retinas clean, so that she can see clearly how things stand in the world. The new world, that is.

  David stares at me impassively, shaking his head, refusing to speak. I have forgotten about his training.

  Alright, he says at last, I’ve remembered something Dulcie once told me. Can’t remember exactly when or why she did but perhaps you’ll find it significant. He places equal stress on all four syllables of significant. I have no idea why. Is he making fun of me, of my Miss Polly piece? I am grateful all the same for the story.

  Dulcie told him of an incident in the desert of Botswana, as a young recruit, when rations were low and everyone was sick of bread and sheep’s fat. She suggested taking honey from a bees’ nest. David can’t remember why the others pooh-poohed the idea, mocked her, wondered if she were man enough to do it by herself. She took off her socks, twisted and knotted them, held a match until they smouldered and intrepidly stormed the nest wearing only a balaclava as protection. Her hands, eyes, mouth were stung; bees covered her face, bored through the fabric of the balaclava, but she carried on, had to, since it was a matter of honour, and managed to fill a basket with dripping honeycombs.

  She swelled up into a roly-poly, hands like loaves of risen dough, eyes buried beneat
h layers of swellings, mouth a drunken pout, face an undulating hillock of yellow-brown flesh. For several days she writhed in agony, unable to take anything except water. When she recovered sufficiently to try a honeycomb, she found that the others had eaten every scrap of it, had left her nothing.

  Dulcie leaned forward to show him the trace of her ordeal, a slight puckering of the eyelids, an excess of stretched skin, she claimed, although, even as he stiffly bent closer to look, he could see no evidence of that savage attack.

  But otherwise, she said, see how the body recovers and renews itself.

  KOKSTAD 1917

  Rachael, squinting severely after the years of grass widowhood and reading newsprint by lamplight, could see nothing wrong with the report in the Advertiser. They had, after all, printed most of her good man’s statement on the trek he had organised to Touwsrivier, but he seemed to have forgotten that he had written it himself; indeed, he had handed it over too hastily, had changed his mind since on a few points perhaps, and had forgotten that the paper had not been revised accordingly. It worried her that he was becoming forgetful—but who wouldn’t after sitting with seals and dassies on Robben Island, just a little rock surrounded by water, so that he no longer found it easy to distinguish between various versions. And that was the trouble, she thought, that was life, just bristling with different versions of things.

  But he hissed and steamed, claiming that they always distorted, that it was after all their function, and when she said in surprise, But Andrew, that nice Mr. Renfrew from the Advertiser, he asked you for a statement, he wouldn’t deliberately tell lies, Andrew calmed down and took her hand.

  My dearest Dorie, you are a sweet, innocent, trusting little thing—had he not noticed that she had grown large, twice her original size as her stomach, swollen by a diet of mealies and so many children, came to match her steatopygia?— but you know nothing of the world. Where in this country of colonists will one find a white man who is not a liar and a cheat? Why do you think they cannot give me back the original if it is in fact an accurate copy? No, they’ve conveniently lost it, just as the missionaries then had lost the deeds to the Clydesdale farm.

  But, she persisted, then they would know that you know that they are lying and that would be so embarrassing.

  Really Dorie, he exploded, that may apply to their own people but not to us. Such is their contempt; they don’t care what Griquas think. Have they not lied under oath and sent me to hard labour in the full knowledge that it was not just? The Griqua Chief must be discredited at all costs. What do they care about truth or embarrassment when there is money or land at stake? No, there is no such thing as shame, and that is why I will go on fighting, why their prisons are nothing to me.

  Rachael said nothing. The years on Robben Island had changed him, though she could not quite say how—except, how like his own description of the enemy he was beginning to sound. She supposed that hearing the water day and night, watching the tide come and go had made him restless, for he would think of nothing but trekking and establishing a new settlement. But really she wished he would not brood so much, flare up so easily. She read through the statement once more. It was a fine piece of writing. She had grown to love the no-longer-new husband for the fine words that just tumbled out of his mouth, leaked out of his pen, tinted with the fire of his spirit so that the very ink glowed red on the page. But really he ought to stick to words. He had no common sense, no idea of money, failed to do his sums properly. Once she had ventured, as nicely as you please, to say something about his calculations, but now knew better. She would have done things quite differently; she who in his absence had performed miracles of housekeeping with a miserly guinea, she would not have laid herself open to charges of embezzlement. Oh, she could have told him then that the whole scheme would flop, that the horses would not take to the dry conditions, that the fields could not possibly yield the projected quantity of grain, that Touwsrivier of all places was the most unlikely Promised Land. Instead she smiled her slow sad smile and hoped for the best. Which did not always come: the Spanish influenza took sixty souls in spite of her tireless nursing.

  When the first rains fell she felt ashamed at her lack of faith. In the new village hall they had built in Touwsrivier she sang in her full contralto, with the tenors weaving in their own praise to God, and the Good Lord gave his message through the deep voice of the Chief. Then she sank to her knees as Andrew the artist painted God’s message in words. And for a people with nothing of their own, smothered in the greyness of the veld, they were pictures of hope, promising the colours of the world: terracottas and the butter yellow of a gentle sun, oranges lanterned in their dark green foliage, and the ivory pumpkin that holds like the earth herself a jewelled secret in its belly, the gold and diamonds and rubies for those who believe in His Word. His words were a symphony of colour, and who was she, O woman of little faith, to question the man who made people rise from their ash heaps and flick aside their fleas so that their voices rose in one song of praise—Juig aarden juig—to a humming earth that would in time bare her bosom to her chosen people.

  Seventeen different tunes they had by then composed for that one hymn, their voices woven in harmony as they waited for the earth to jubilate in justice. It was best to keep to the same words: same God, same story as of old, of being led out of bondage; the yearning for the new would find outlet in wordless sound. And so she went about humming, clinging to the words of the hymn, but trying out new tunes—blocking memory’s chosen moments—with which to wipe out Andrew’s brand new words on the trek, or migration, as he called it in the Advertiser of seven December. He had not dictated that statement to her. The thing already in print, he read out hastily only from the trials of Touwsrivier, his acknowledgement of her help, only the paragraph with her name:

  It is quite natural that we have had great responsibilities thrown upon myself and Mrs. Le Fleur in first aid and sickness, in seeing to the spiritual needs of the people, their bodily needs, and in teaching them how to use economically their small sources of income.

  As for the rest, which she had read for herself in disbelief, the stuff about outcasts and things, well—and she shut her eyes for a moment, shook her head which had grown heavy with disbelief—well, that hymn to God would have to preserve her, for if she could only get the correct emphasis, the correct rising note for the last line, Eer Hom met ’n lofgedig—honour Him with a song of praise—or even, and yes, there she had it: a repetition of lofgedig followed by the entire line once more, that would do the trick, restore the harmony. And thus came into being the eighteenth tune for Juig aarden juig, which, people still say, is the most powerful of all, and not surprising too, since its birth had given the Mother of the Nation, overnight, a head as uniformly grey as that of an ostrich.

  Andrew said not a word about the disappearance of the cutting. He kept silent too about the chronological muddle in the file where Rachael had replaced the piece with the fifteen-year-old, yellow-edged cutting of the letter to the Advertiser, previously kept in her Bible. This she read daily, nodding to the familiar words that now slipped into the melody of her famous eighteenth tune. The letter sang:

  Sir, will you allow us space to refer to a certain book written by the Reverend William Dower, called ‘Early Annals of Kokstad and East Griqualand.’

  She held the rough paper with both hands, reverently, as if it were the tissue-fine page of its old home in Ecclesiastes.

  Why does Mr. Dower not tell the readers of his book that he and his sons were treated like burghers by the Griqua government when farms and plots were granted to them by Captain Kok and his Council? And yet he mocks them today re their custom of parliamentary sittings.… Why does Mr. Dower not tell the readers of his book that in 1881 or 1882, he got a bond passed on the church properties, in his favour, for the sum of £300.… We are now coming to what Mr. Dower says about the wife of our Paramount Chief.

  She hums through the quoted description:

  ‘olive complexion, sho
rt, woolly, peppercorn hair, sleepy eyes, high cheekbones, small hands; her type of beauty was not exactly queenly; in truth she was but a wrinkled piece of womanhood.’

  She shuts her eyes at the closing line:

  … a want of refinement in a minister of the gospel which is simply astounding to us. We are, etc., Griqua Committee.

  Rachael finds the etcetera especially fine. Delicate, commodious, all-embracing, and repeatable—like lofgedig—so that she sings once more, We are, etcetera, …

  And what do we know of our ancestors, the little people who, loping along the strand at the Cape of Storms/Good Hope, watched a smudge on the horizon feed on the indeterminate space between sea and April sky, and before whose amazed eyes grew steadily, with the help of a conniving wind, the full white sails of a Dutch ship? Only that which is passed down by word of mouth, for there was no one to record those momentous times.

  Surely there was someone who could have written it down for them, Le Fleur asked himself.

  But that history is one that has failed to imagine the world from another’s point of view, even if the other were, strictly speaking, the hosts. Did the little people like beads and bits of shiny things, or did they, having exchanged their treasures out of politeness and hospitality, toss those worthless trinkets at their children? What we do know is that they were impossible, ungovernable, that Van Riebeeck found them too lazy to be enslaved, for they both worked and wandered off whenever they pleased, with no regard for the needs of their new master-benefactors, no grasp of the principles at play, and no notion of obedience, so that real slaves had to be imported.

  But of those, the ships from Madagascar or Malaya, Le Fleur did not wish to think, and in any case, the high cheekbones, the oriental eyes were as likely to come from the native Khoisan. Of his own European ancestry, well, that blood was by now so thin, so negligible, there really was no need to take it into account.