by Lewis Desoto
A clarity forms in her mind, as if for the first time, as if all her life she has existed in a fog. She sees her life as if for the first time, and she knows now her destination. She begins to limp towards the farm, the pain in her leg nothing to her now. Every object seems drawn with a fine pen, delineated in clear crisp lines and colors. The clarity is sharp and hard and cold.
There is the kraal, the huts empty; there is the washhouse, the tap; there is the windmill, turning; there is the row of eucalyptus trees where the doves roost; there is the farmhouse, empty; there are the fields, the fences, the outbuildings; there is the road. There is the veldt, the hills, the trees, the sky. Once she lived here, with a gentle man who dreamed of a different life, and a young woman who gave kindness and love.
Here is the farm. And here is the river.
TEMBI WALKS one step at a time, one foot placed in front of the other; step by step she travels across the empty veldt. Behind her lies the end of the world—death, destruction, murder. She is hungry, she is thirsty, but her thoughts are directed to one place only.
She turns her thoughts forward, to home, to Märit. Goodness and mercy, Märit. Goodness and mercy.
The sun drops out of sight behind the hills, the sky pales into a washed-out violet, darkness falls. Tembi walks on. By starlight and by moonlight she walks on. She sings a song, from the days before, when her father walked up the hill to greet her in the morning light, when her mother sang on the banks of the river in her sky blue dress. She sings softly, to give herself courage, to give herself strength.
Ku yosulw’ inyembezi, nokufa nezinsizi
Ayibalwa iminyaka, ubusuk’ abukho.
God shall wipe away all tears, there’s no death, no pain, nor fears
And they count not time by years, for there is no night there.
In the land that does not dry, you will never age,
for there is no night there.
At first light she is still walking. One foot placed in front of the other, one step after the other. The landscape becomes familiar, for she is out of the valleys now and into the flat veldt, dotted with acacias. A ridge, a bend in the road, the river appearing. And there is the tall rock rising above the veldt, the rock called Isitimane, where her garden grows, and the kraal, and the windmill that turns in the breeze, and the farmhouse with its thatched roof. And Märit.
HERE IS THE RIVER. It seems to Märit that her journey from the koppie to the banks of the flowing river has taken a lifetime. How many days has she been wandering across the parched and brown earth towards the river? All her life.
She does not turn to look back at the house, the distant house standing isolated in the glare, the white walls bright in the sunlight. She can never turn back, she can never go there again, because the journey is too long, the distance too far.
Märit lowers herself to her knees and cups water into her hands, washing the sweet stickiness of the fruit from her face. She drinks, but the cool water gives her no comfort, no sustenance. She is beyond thirst now.
Easing herself onto a rock she lets her wounded leg rest in an eddy of the swirling stream. On her calf and thigh the thin red lines have spread into a pattern of streams and tributaries. The coolness of the liquid on her burning foot gives no relief, for the pain is everywhere, a part of her now, a constant part of her body that she has grown accustomed to. Pain is life.
The river flows, always, through the dry landscape, between the hills, into the valleys and the plains, past the towns and the cities. The river flows, through the country that is not hers, until somewhere it reaches the sea and spills into the great wide ocean and loses itself.
I have always been lost, Märit realizes. I have never belonged anywhere or to anything. My life has been a dream. I have failed—at marriage, family, friendship, farming—at life.
She looks down at her hands. Her fingernails are caked with dirt, rimmed with black; in the fine lines of her knuckles is a map of darker lines, like a map that she carries in her skin. Even her body is unreal to her now.
On her wrist is a bracelet of blue beads, the color of the sky. Märit unfastens the beads and sets them on the rock. Tembi once wore those beads, but Tembi is gone.
She remembers Tembi, but the past is something that happened to someone else.
I have holes in me, she thinks, and all memory has emptied from me. I have lived in a world made of glass; everything around me is painted on glass that could shatter into a million shards at any moment. But what is behind the glass? Märit looks up at the sky. There is nothing behind the glass. The sky vibrates, the thin blue cloth is ready to rip and shred at any moment. When the sky rips apart will the light flood through, or will darkness pour down and bury her?
Leaving the rock where she sits, Märit eases into the river. Under her feet are pebbles and then sand, and then nothing, as she kicks off and swims out to midstream.
She will enter the water and become water, become air, become nothing.
Letting her limbs go slack, Märit allows the current to take her. She opens her mouth and swallows water, then coughs and struggles to raise her head above the surface.
She is afraid, afraid to do what she desires now.
She lets herself go limp again, giving in, not resisting. She begins to fall, and the pressure on her lungs grows, and momentarily she struggles against the fear.
She closes her eyes and the fear leaves her. A great weariness like sleep descends over her. The water embraces Märit, carrying her into the opaque depths. Darkness fills her eyes. Opening her mouth wide, Märit lets the river fill her, drawing her into a deep emptiness, turning and turning her into the vast darkness. She feels herself moving towards the sea, cradled and embraced in the warm and deep blue sea.
HERE IS THE FARM.
Tembi’s heart lifts, and the weariness of her long journey lifts from her aching body as she sees the fields, the windmill, the koppie, the kraal, the farmhouse with its walls bright in the sunlight.
“Märit!” she calls. Her voice is small in the silence. “Märit! I’m back.”
Tembi runs towards the house.
Märit is not in the house. The rooms seem weighted with an atmosphere of abandonment, as if nobody has lived here for a very long time.
Tembi hurries out the back door and follows the familiar path to the kraal. “Märit,” she calls. From hut to hut she searches, and at each one she calls, “Märit, Märit.”
As she stands in the clearing outside the huts, calling one more time, Tembi’s eyes are drawn towards the koppie. A peculiar sense of foreboding comes over her. Heart beating with anxiety and misgiving, she seeks out her garden.
The soil is trampled, the vines are broken, the fruit is gone.
With an exclamation Tembi falls to her knees, her fingers searching amongst the broken stalks and leaves. The fruit is gone. The garden has been plundered. All for nothing. All the days of nurture, of carrying buckets of water, all the care and hope—all for nothing.
She slumps down in despair. Even this has been destroyed.
As Tembi gets to her feet she sees a scattering of seeds on the ground. Quickly she gathers them into her palm. Five seeds. All that is left of the sweetness that she tried to nurture forth from the earth.
In amongst the vines and leaves Tembi makes out the imprint of a hand in the soft soil—a very clear outline where someone has leaned heavily on the earth. She places her own hand on the shape that has been pressed into the soil. She remembers a day when she sat with Märit on the rocks by the river, a day of innocence, when she let her wet hand rest a moment on the warm surface of a rock, and the outline left behind was like a drawing on the stone, and as it faded, evaporating, Märit placed her own hand on the imprint. Tembi remembers how the two hands matched.
Märit has been here.
Tembi raises her head. “Märit!” Only an echo answers her call, only an echo thin and faint.
She stands, clutching the seeds, and looks towards the river. The foreboding shivers th
rough her again, a feeling so intense it makes her tremble.
The river flows, silent, eternal, always moving. There are footprints and scuff marks in the sand near the shallows. Tembi does not have to examine them or place her own feet there to know that they belong to Märit. But the footprints lead in only one direction, into the river.
Tembi wades into the shallows. A flash of blue catches her eye—a bracelet of blue beads gleams on the rock. She holds it in her hand a moment before fastening it onto her wrist. Her eyes rest upon the smooth flow of the river for a long, long time. The premonition that she felt earlier is now a certainty. She knows it in her body, and in her soul is a sudden absence, as if something has been removed.
Tembi does not call out again. She knows with a terrible and final certainty that it is futile to call Märit’s name.
She turns and slowly walks away from the river.
Here is the farm: the windmill silhouetted against the blue sky, the grass rustling in the breeze, the white walls and thatched roof of the house, all so still and quiet.
She opens her hand and studies the five small seeds in her palm. She bends down and carefully places the seeds on the soil.
Here she will grow that which does not as yet grow. In this small acre of the world. From here the sweetness will come. A gift.
But first she must plant the seeds.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Meet the Author
LEWIS DESOTO was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to a family that arrived from Europe in the eighteenth century. His writing has been published in numerous journals, and he was awarded the Books in Canada/Writers’ Union Short Prose Award. A Blade of Grass has been published in 14 countries and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France). It is also a finalist for the 2005 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and is shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A past editor of Literary Review of Canada, Lewis DeSoto lives with his wife in Normandy and Toronto.
My History
IN 1652 the first white settlement of South Africa began. Three hundred years later, almost to the day, I was born into the consequences of that arrival. After wars amongst Afrikaners, British, Zulu, Xhosa, and many others, (wars over land, over cattle, over water, over gold and diamonds) a system known as apartheid was firmly in place. The word means ‘separateness,’ and in practice it meant that by the 1960s the three million or so whites had separated themselves from the eleven million South Africans who were of a different color—a political separation, an economic separation, a physical separation, and most tragically, a psychological separation.
In the years before I left South Africa, all black political parties and workers’ unions had been banned; The Immorality Act had been passed, which meant that whites and blacks could not marry, cohabit, or have sexual relations; The Group Areas Act had come into law, whereby blacks and whites could not live in the same villages, towns, or cities; The Suppression of Communism Act had been passed, making it illegal to belong to the Communist Party; The Native Act required all black people to carry a permit with them all the time; The 90 Days Detention Act allowed the government to arrest people without allowing them recourse to the courts. All white males over the age of sixteen were required to undergo military training.
In those same years, 67 unarmed demonstrators, most of them women, were shot and killed by the police; the Prime Minister was assassinated; Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were sentenced to life imprisonment; schoolchildren rioted in the black ghettos, and were shot and imprisoned in response; the South African military engaged in clandestine wars across its borders; political opponents of the regime were imprisoned, were murdered, went into exile, or disappeared.
“We lived in privilege and poverty, in fear and anger, in hope and hopelessness, in struggle and apathy. We lived like strangers, in a strange land.
That was the South Africa I knew.”
Through it all we lived in our comfortable houses with our gardens, our swimming pools, our holidays at the seaside resorts—and our servants. We lived in privilege and poverty, in fear and anger, in hope and hopelessness, in struggle and apathy. We lived like strangers, in a strange land.
That was the South Africa I knew.
An Interview with Lewis DeSoto
What do you think is the most common misconception people who haven’t been to South Africa and only learn about it from the news have about the country and its people, black and white, and how they relate to each other? Does your book attempt to address these misconceptions indirectly? If so, how?
When we have only limited knowledge about a place or situation we all tend to make judgments that are simplified. I suppose that’s human nature. In A Blade of Grass the relations between the characters, on both a political and personal level, are complex, changeable, and often contradictory. I wanted the book to convey the fact that what we sometimes know only from newspaper headlines is actually about human individuals, struggling on the most personal level, and that these characters might not be so different from us in their hopes and their fears.
Some of the events you describe in A Blade of Grass—such as the violent eviction of white farmers, food shortages resulting from political conflict, random, casual victimization of black people—seem to be ripped from the headlines. Are the countries surrounding South Africa going through the same trauma of the land that South Africa experienced decades ago? How does South Africa differ from her neighboring countries?
Africa is a troubled and varied and complex continent that is still struggling to find equilibrium after two centuries of upheaval caused by colonial exploitation on the part of the European nations. It has been abandoned and thrust into the modern world without much in the way of resources or institutions. The histories of America and Europe contain all the convulsions that we now see being replayed in Africa. South Africa has an ugly history, but it is fortunate in now being wealthy, modern, industrialized, and having a stable political structure. Perhaps it can offer hope to the continent.
Did you intend for A Blade of Grass to be more of a social and political commentary or a reflection on the inner lives of your characters? If a story unfolds in a country torn by conflict, is it possible for it NOT to be political?
“South Africa has an ugly history, but it is fortunate in now being wealthy, modern, industrialized, and having a stable political structure. Perhaps it can offer hope to the continent.”
Politics in A Blade of Grass are mostly in the background, but always present. I don’t think it’s possible to write about a time of conflict and ignore the political situation. To do so would be false and dishonest. Although my book concentrates on the relationship between two women, all their actions and feelings are determined by the situation in which they live. Their desire to find a place to call home is a universal one, but the form of that search is shaped and qualified by the fact that they live in a time of oppression and racism.
Have you returned to South Africa since your departure for Canada? If so, how was this experience different from growing up and living there? If you haven’t been back, was that a conscious decision and if so, why?
I consciously disinherited myself from South Africa when I left and I have never returned. I did this out of shame and anger and because I believed that apartheid would not end in my lifetime, or if it did then the end would come in blood and flames. When Mandela became president in the first ever free elections I allowed myself to confront all that I had buried deep within my soul, to say the word home for the first time in decades. I intended to return to the country of my birth then, but I had started writing A Blade of Grass and I knew that I should finish the book before returning, otherwise it would be a very different story. I am now planning a trip back to South Africa, hoping to bring the past into the present.
“I am now planning a trip back to South Africa, hoping to bring the past into the
present.”
About the book
The Story Behind the Book
IN ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS of reverie, half-dream, half-waking, that sometimes come just before sleep, I saw an image of a woman walking on a dusty road in the African countryside, in the country of my youth. Her hair was shorn, she walked barefoot, and although she was a white woman, she wore the clothes of a rural farmworker. Such an air of tragedy emanated from her that the image lodged itself deeply in my consciousness, haunting me for days afterward. She seemed to be someone I knew, to have her origin in my own life. This was the woman who became Märit.
I did not wonder where this woman was walking to, because I knew somehow that she walked toward the future. I wondered instead where she had come from, what she had left, why she walked alone. As I retraced her steps in my imagination, along that dusty road, following the imprints of her bare feet in the sand, I saw a farm, a white-walled house with a thatched straw roof, a windmill turning in the breeze over the corn fields. And standing in front of the house was another woman, a young black woman, shading her eyes against the glare as she peered into the distance where the road disappeared toward the hills. On her face was an expression of longing, and of hope. This was Tembi.
These images arose out of the depths of my memory, out of emotions that had been lodged in my soul, still there after countless years, after departure, after exile, after the creation of another life in another country. Still the taste of dust on my lips, still the smell of woodsmoke from early morning cooking fires, still the sound of the cicadas in the long