A Blade of Grass

by Lewis Desoto

  Now he has his farm, where he can plant his almond trees. Märit has no dream of her own for the farm, but she responds to this longing in him, although it unsettles her a bit too, for she likes to think of him as an uncomplicated man, a steady, plain man, without talk of longings and souls. This talk of yearning unsettles her because she relies on Ben to be strong and plain and understandable, the rock against which she can secure her own vague, troubling sense of displacement and anxiety.

  As she crosses the plowed soil she stumbles a bit on the hard clods of earth, realizing that she ought to have changed her shoes. But she forgets these simple things often. There seems to be a separation between the house and the countryside around it that she must constantly cross, yet when she crosses that border she does not know how to be, where to go, what to do. She tries to think of herself as a farmer, as a farmer’s wife, but the truth is that only in the house can she find some purpose. The land seems to be in possession of the workers and there is no place for her to function.

  It’s different for Ben. When his father died at fifty from a heart attack, sitting in his car outside a small suburban house in Manchester, Ben realized he could leave. His mother had passed away two years earlier, and now he has no further connection to the drab streets of his childhood. He came to this country because he heard that there was land available, that there were farms to purchase, that the government wanted farmers, especially on the border. Grants were available and the land was cheap and fertile.

  This is Ben’s dream. To be a farmer. He has come to this country as an immigrant, has learned the languages, has learned the climate and the geography and the history. He has even changed the spelling of his name from Lawrence to Laurens, to an Afrikaans spelling, not so much to disguise his origins—his accent will always testify to that—but as a commitment to a new life, as an accommodation to the place where he intends to live.

  It’s different for Ben; he is the Baas, they accept him, they rely on him, they defer to him. Ben wants to be here, he wants to farm, to work on the land. And she is here because of Ben, for Ben.

  She sees the figures on the far side of the field, and recognizes her husband from the hat that he habitually wears outside. The men are stringing long strands of shiny wire between the posts that were dug into the ground on the previous two days. Fences are a fact of life here: to keep what is yours inside, to keep those who desire what is yours outside. This is a land of separations—between veldt and cultivated, between wild and domestic, between black and white.

  Ben glances over as she approaches and straightens up, handing his oversized pliers to one of the workers. He smiles at her. The work stops, the other three men turning to watch her approach. Ben steps forward, a tall man, his face already sun-darkened around his mustache, laugh lines etched at the corners of his eyes, for he is a man who smiles often.

  “I thought you might be thirsty. I’ve brought you some tea.” She offers the Thermos to Ben, not looking at the other men.

  “Wonderful. You are a godsend, darling.” He kisses her, the stubble on his chin brushing her cheek, and she smells the soil of the country and the hot air and his perspiration and his tobacco. The smell of him, which she knows now.

  He turns and says to the men, “We’ll take a rest now.” They sink to their haunches, setting their tools aside. One of them produces a little bag of tobacco and begins to roll a cigarette.

  “Good afternoon,” Märit says to them.

  “Missus.” They smile, they nod their heads. She does not know their names, and there is nothing she can think of to say to them.

  “What have you been doing with yourself?” Ben asks.

  “Accounts. Talking to Grace. Nothing much, really.” She does not say that she is lonely. “Grace wants a few days off to visit a sick cousin.”

  “Does she? Well, that’s good. That’s fine. We can fend for ourselves, can’t we?”

  “Of course. Grace has a daughter, Tembi, who will come in to help.”

  “Good. Excellent.” He unscrews the cap of the Thermos and pours some tea into it. “Want some?”

  “No, it’s for you.” She watches him drink, the way his Adam’s apple moves as he swallows, a glint of perspiration on his neck where it disappears into his shirt. She wants to put her hand there, to feel the pulse of his energy. She looks at the men, then away.

  “I brought some biscuits too. Are you hungry?”

  “Famished.” Ben unwraps the waxed paper, then hesitates and looks over at the men, who are sitting on the ground regarding Märit with mild curiosity. “I’ll have the tea first,” he says, and puts the biscuits in a pocket.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think to bring enough for them too.”

  “Oh, they’ll be all right.”

  She knows he is embarrassed to eat the biscuits in front of the men. And she knows that he will share the biscuits with them when she leaves.

  “How is the work going here?” Märit asks.

  His face lights up. “Fine, fine. But there won’t be enough wire to enclose the whole field. I’ll have to go into Klipspring and get some more.”

  “Today?” Today, she hopes—now—so that she can ride with him into the town, so that she can speak to people, so that she can sit on the terrace of the Retief Hotel and drink something sweet and cool, with ice in the glass.

  “No, there’s no hurry. I’m waiting for that shipment of seedlings to come in on the train. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  Ben replaces the cap of the Thermos and screws the cover back on. He glances over at the men waiting patiently. Märit senses that he wants to get back to work. He is always eager to get back to work; his energy for the farm is boundless.

  “Well,” Märit says. “I’ll see you at supper.”

  “Yes, darling. I’ll see you then.” He smiles and touches her arm lightly. “What will you do now?”

  “I’m going to take a walk.” She gestures vaguely at the countryside around them.

  Ben kisses her again, on the cheek this time, and squeezes her hand.

  As if this is their signal to resume work, the men rise to their feet and nod to her as she passes. She walks on, away from the house. And when she looks back she sees Ben handing out the biscuits to his helpers. Märit envies the men, because they have their work, because they have their place on this farm, but most of all because they have his company.

  She waves, but Ben does not see her.

  THE SILENCE RETURNS. Almost before Märit is out of the men’s sight, the sounds fade behind her—the sound of their voices, the sound of their tools, the sound of Ben’s voice—and then she hears only the birds and she is alone.

  This is wild country. The farms are miles apart, the towns even farther. She cannot place herself exactly, not geographically, not spiritually. This is not like the place where she grew up, where the gardens that lined the suburban streets were lush from the sprinklers that hissed their mist every morning and evening. Not like the city, where nature took the form of manicured parks behind wrought-iron fences, where the signs on the gates read “Whites Only.” Not like the stretch of coast where she went with her parents on a holiday, where sugarcane plantations grew right up to the railway line that separated the strip of beach and hotels from the rest of the country. Not like the farm where she went one summer when she was sixteen to stay with a school friend, in the wine country, just outside the city, where mimosa grew abundant and there was a swimming pool.

  This is a wild country with a history that Märit does not understand—a contested history, of which she has only a vague understanding. In the schools she attended, history begins with the arrival of a ship at the Cape, when a white man claims the country. Before that it is a history of other people, whose story is considered unimportant. They have no history. She knows that her education has been stilted, that her thinking is conventional, that her life is unremarkable. She knows all these things, but the knowledge does not make it any easier to stand here under the weight of the sile
nce.

  This is a wild country—perhaps it belongs only to the animals.

  There are animals in the valleys and the forests and on the veldt. She has not seen them for she does not venture into those places, but she has heard the stories, told by the farmers who come to visit Ben, who sit in the living room with coffee and rusks and sometimes a glass of apple brandy. Stories of the leopard that took a child from a village in the middle of the night, of elephants drunk on marula berries rampaging through fields of maize, of the baboons that invaded a house when the owners were absent and pillaged the kitchen and left excrement on the table.

  Märit talks to Koos van Staden, the nearest neighbor, about animals, because she wants to see them; like a tourist from the city she wants to see wild animals. This is the wild country around here and she wants to see the wild animals and the real Africa.

  “No, Mevrou,” van Staden says, laughing in a good-natured way at her innocence and naïveté, “you won’t see much around here anymore. This is all farming country now, the wild things have been driven away into hiding. They are out there, and they see us, but we don’t see them.

  “But,” he says, “sometimes a troop of baboons will come down into the mealie fields, usually if there is a drought. They like the mealies.” He laughs again and says, “I remember when I was a kid and my father still ran the farm—in those days we had quite a problem with the baboons. There was a troop of them that lived in the hills and they would wait until just before we harvested the mealies. I don’t know how they knew, but they would come down out of the hills in the early morning and ruin the whole field. It happened regularly.

  “They are very clever animals,” he continues, “but they can sometimes be damn stupid. Now, what your baboon does when he gets to the mealie field is pick a couple of cobs and stick them under his arm, but then instead of taking those off with him to eat somewhere he picks a few more, and of course he doesn’t have any way to carry them, except to tuck them under his arm, which he does. And he goes through the whole row of mealies doing this, so that by the time he reaches the end, he still has only two or three cobs under his arm. And in his wake are all your mealies lying on the ground. You can imagine what happens when a troop of twenty of them get into the fields.

  “My old man used to go up into the hills with his rifle and spend the whole day up there. I would hear the shots, but when he came back he would only shake his head. A baboon is clever that way—he knows what a gun is, he knows when you are after him, and he hides.

  “But we finally got rid of those baboons. Not with guns or fences or anything like that. One of the old black workers on the farm told us what we should do. So, we built a kind of trap and put some nice food in there, food from the table, and early one morning we heard a terrible noise and when we ran out there was a baboon in the trap. Very angry too. He’d eaten the food, of course, but now he wanted to leave and he was screaming his head off. And there, just on the other side of the fence, we saw his brothers and sisters shouting to him. They have their own language, you know, and they look out for each other, just like people.

  “Well, my father wasn’t going to let him go, not just yet. First he sent me to get the can of paint that we had set aside, a can of whitewash, the same thing you use to whitewash the walls. We couldn’t use brushes on that baboon in the trap, he was much too angry, and you know they have teeth that can rip your arm to the bone. No, we just threw the paint over him. When he was covered in white paint we opened the trap and stood back.

  “He was out of there like a shot, charging across the veldt to his friends. As soon as they saw him they all fell silent. And then they started to run. The closer he got, the faster they ran. And he was screaming at them to wait for him, but they just ran from this strange white baboon. They’d never seen anything like it before, so they ran away.

  “We heard him up there in the hills, screaming for them to come back, and his voice growing fainter, but those other baboons didn’t want anything to do with him. I believe they thought he was a ghost. A white baboon ghost.”

  These are stories meant to tease her, to frighten her the way one frightens a child, to make her admire the brave farmers.

  Once, in the deep hours of the night, soon after she had come to the farm, Märit sat up in bed awakened by the whining howl of a hyena, half laughter, half mad keening. She wanted to reach out to shake Ben awake too, and tell him that a wild animal was on the farm, but the howl of the hyena, the madness and lust in the eerie laughter, held her transfixed where she sat clutching the pillow, listening to a sound that seemed to come from inside her own throat. Her neighbors, the farmers, have no sentimental notions about the animals. They are practical men and women, intent on growing their crops, on taming the wild, on being successful farmers. There are guns to keep the animals away. Their guns are a solution. And the animals are hidden now, in the wild country.

  Märit walks on, into the silence, where the shadow of the koppie that is called Devil’s Head throws a long shape across the ground at her feet. With the farm behind her and the wild country all around she feels like a trespasser, with a trespasser’s sense of apprehension—as if this land is not hers, as if she has no right to be here.

  But is this land not hers to walk? She owns it, does she not? Her money and Ben’s has paid for her right to walk here. It is hers to walk.

  She stops and looks back the way she has come. There is nobody in sight. There is always someone when she walks, always someone busy with some task, and if she stops to watch she feels herself an interloper. There is always someone there, wherever you go, in the whole country. So many strangers. They are always watching you, gauging your purpose, your intent towards them. And they are wary of you, not unfriendly, but always deferential, unforthcoming. Because to be in their presence means you want something—information, labor, identification papers. Her attempts at small talk are always awkward, unsuccessful, making the workers nervous as they apprehend her own nervousness. Conversation ceases when she appears, and only resumes with nervous laughter when she has gone on her way. She never knows what to say. Ben can talk to them—he can talk about work, about the farm—and he can work with them so that they accept him, if not as one of them, at least as a man. He has an easy rapport, and speaks their language, albeit imperfectly, but they laugh good-naturedly at his mistakes and his jokes. But she cannot talk to them. Nor does she ever visit the kraal, where the women are. It is too intimate there, too different from the way she herself lives. Their lives are hidden. And she is hidden from them.

  She has never really known one of them as a friend, only as a servant.

  They are not natural in her presence. Because of the differences. Because the color of their skin is different from hers. Everything is based on that distinction. She brings a discord into their lives. She is always a stranger. Color is the marker—here on this farm, in this country, across this whole continent.

  Only in the house is she at home, between the walls. Only there. She might own the farm and all the land, but only in the farmhouse is she at home. Sometimes not even there.

  The realization comes to Märit that she fears them. She is uneasy in their presence, because they are so many. In the city you don’t notice it so much, but out here it is she who is different, she who is the stranger.

  And do they fear her? They give her respect and deference, and they probably fear her too. Because she owns the land, because she can do what she likes, even order them off the land, take away their homes if it came to that. She can burn the crops or let them rot in the fields. She can sell or not sell. She has authority over their residence permits and their livelihood. She can come and go. They cannot.

  But even so, even so.

  Märit clambers over some rocks at the base of the koppie, and comes upon what looks like a little garden. Someone has closed off a piece of the land, here in this barren place, and tilled the soil and built a barrier of rocks and thorn scrub. Even here, she thinks, is the attempt to fence o
ff, to enclose, to possess. But the effort is pathetic, like some child’s attempt to mimic a garden.

  She bends down to touch the soil and a small green lizard darts away into a crevice. Märit recoils. Even here some creature watches you, and waits for you to leave. The clods of dark soil crumble and trickle through her fingers. And who owns this? she asks herself. Me? Ben? The child who built this garden? The lizard that watches from the shadowed crevice? Or none of us?

  6

  SHE WALKS ON AWAY from the koppie, into the long yellow grass, and the coarse texture of the grass brushes across her bare legs. She stops, looking down at her pale skin, wary of snakes, because she is only wearing sandals that leave her ankles and calves exposed. Always something to fear, to watch out for.

  The terror of snakes has haunted her from childhood, ever since that time when her father took her to the Snake Park in Durban. Until then, Märit had never seen a snake up close, but she had an instinctive revulsion to them. When her father asked Märit and her mother that day if they wanted to go to the Snake Park, her mother shook her head adamantly and said, “I won’t be going near any snakes, thank you very much.”

  “And you, Märit?” her father asked.

  “Yes, I’ll come, Daddy,” she said. Even though she was afraid. But she wanted to show her father that she trusted him, that she was brave.

  Märit remembers the name of the place, the FitzSimons Snake Park, on Lower Marine Parade, the long road that runs along the beach, and how when she got out of the car, her hands were damp and her armpits wet from the humidity and from her nervousness. She could smell the sea air and hear the booming of the waves on the beach not far off. She remembers that she asked her father as they stood in the parking lot, “Maybe we should go to the beach instead and collect some shells for Mommy?”