Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  He thanked his Ancestors from the bottom of his heart. Then he retired into the depths of the bush, accepting the scratches and the blood, and was rewarded by a rat-proof resting place in a dome of green leaves that smelled inexpressibly sweet. There was mud on the ground and he laid himself in it. It clung to his skin, and dried, and made him warm, and he slept for eleven hours, diverted by dreams of home.

  It was after nine o’clock when Ntsina awoke, and the milkman had long since been and gone. The morning heat swelled gently through the leaves above him. He shifted, and the mud on his back cracked. It was rich, red mud. For a moment he thought he was in Gwadana, but the belch of a goods van told him otherwise. He lay in the bush, thinking. To get home he needed money. Having come all this way, he did not intend, upon further reflection, to return without the hut tax or a radio. This part of the previous day’s plan he would modify.

  Ntsina emerged from the bush and brushed the dried mud from him. He did it vigorously, rejoicing in the softness it had given his skin. He scratched his crotch methodically. Already his memory of the woman’s rash was easing, though the itch remained. Looking about him, he saw that across the road was the largest homestead he had ever seen.

  —

  DOROTHY SHABRILL stood with her husband at one end of the vast space that would soon be her drawing room. With them was the decorator, Mr. Naryshkin, an impossibly good-looking Russian from the Caucasus. Dorothy, a parson’s daughter, did not like him. She knew that her aunts in Tunbridge Wells would disapprove of him. And yet, as he and Percy conversed, she did not feel able to hold her own against the combined wishes of her husband and this ghastly man. Dorothy had been sent into a panic by Percy’s decision to invite Piet Barol. She had met Piet on the liner that had brought them all from Europe. She recalled having been in ebullient spirits, and talking too confidently of the School for Servants’ Children she had come to South Africa to found.

  The failure of this institution was a matter of unspeakable shame to Dorothy Shabrill.

  “Capital. Capital,” Percy was saying. Dear Percy. She did love him. He took her hand. “My. Naryshkin says the papers and the curtains will be hung in time for the party. Whether the furniture is here depends on the boat from Europe. She left Southampton yesterday. If she doesn’t arrive, we’ll put them up at the Carlton.” He turned to Mr. Naryshkin. “There’d better be a dining table. We’ve thirty coming to dinner next week.”

  —

  PIET WAS WOKEN by the sound of a battered Louis Vuitton trunk being dragged into the room. He put his face under a pillow but in the darkness his future pressed down on him unendurably. He lifted his head, rolled over, and said, seeing his wife: “I wish you’d take that off.”

  Stacey was wearing the scarlet dressing gown she had worn at their first meeting. It was now open at two seams and stained with breast milk. She looked at him, hesitated, and let it slip into a puddle at her feet. Piet stood up and went to her. Worry had kept Stacey awake most of the night. It seemed fitting that Piet should atone for the anxiety he had caused her. She liked to make love in the morning, and before she slept, and for the whole of Sunday afternoon.

  When they were finished they were no longer angry with one another.

  “I’m sorry, my dearest one.” Piet kissed her shoulder. “Forgive me. Help me.”

  “It’s your own pride that will destroy us. You must conquer it.”

  “I know.”

  “The more you let Percy Shabrill demean you, the more he will end by paying us. He’s terribly jealous of you. You must make him feel like he has won.”

  “It rather looks like he has,” said Piet, bitterly.

  —

  NTSINA WAS STILL GAZING, wonderstruck, at the vast house when its wood gates swung open and an open-topped Packard nosed through them. It reminded him of the murderous monsters Amariva had loosed on the earth. Sitting in the back was a white woman who looked so unhappy he lost his fear of her.

  He spoke three of the six English words he knew. These were: “I am hungry.”

  The sight of a Kaffir in obvious want brought Dorothy to her senses. She was the luckiest woman alive, as Percy often told her. She had studied the Gospel too imaginatively to share most Europeans’ instinctive fear of a black face. She could see at once that this young man was from the countryside. He had not the veneer of city suffering. She could tell he was kind, and the way he hung his head and stood back from her, and then glanced up at her, and looked away again, told her that he had been raised by a good woman.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Ntsina, employing his remaining three English words.

  “Very well. Run inside to the kitchen. Mrs. Mafuduka will give you something to eat and something to do.”

  The Xhosa chauffeur, observing that Ntsina failed to respond to this instruction, translated it for him. The radiance of Ntsina’s smile made Dorothy feel better, and silenced her thoughts on the matter of the decorative scheme to which she had just consented. The chief colour of this scheme was mauve. It was she who had remarked how pretty mauve is, when shown a hand-coloured photograph of the Empress of Russia’s boudoir. She had not intended this careless enthusiasm to infiltrate every inch of her house, nor did she agree with Mr. Naryshkin about the importance of unifying themes. Nevertheless, she had quite possibly saved a young man’s life. This being what Jesus would have done, she felt fortified.

  Ntsina, meanwhile, walked into a new world. A gang of men were laying bales of real lawn across the dry orange dust of the Rand. Behind them, twenty others were planting rose bushes along gravel paths. Nature had been sold into slavery. The smell of something foreign, which he did not know was creosote, was heavy on the breeze, drowning the scent of the roses. Only a nose as keen as Ntsina’s could have caught the flowers’ graceful lingerings beneath the dust and the turpentine. He knocked at a door and was pleased to see that the young woman who came to answer it was both a fellow Xhosa and very pretty. He had a way with pretty girls that made them fond of him and he smiled his most submissive smile as she came close.

  “I am here for Mama Mafuduka,” he said.

  In his damp clothes, mud behind his ears, Ntsina Zini provoked interest and sympathy in the Shabrills’ kitchen. He was given a cup of strong tea with six full spoons of sugar stirred into it. An entire loaf of bread and half a pound of butter were placed before him. The butter was freshly churned and salty. He had not tasted something so delicious in many moons, and kept his eyes to his plate to make sure no one stole it. But the Shabrills’ servants were not like the men in the mines. The only thing taken from him was his damp undershirt, which was put near a warm stove and replaced by another of rough but spotless cotton. Ntsina’s grandmother was renowned as a laundress and Ntsina knew at once that a woman like his grandmother had washed this shirt. The housekeeper was jovial and fat. “I am your servant, mama,” he said. “With this big house and those sore knees you must need a young man’s help. I can carry and lift and I do not shirk duty and I am respectful and I do not drink.”

  “Then you are welcome here,” said Mrs. Mafuduka. “Where are you from, brother?”

  “From the forest of Gwadana, mama.”

  “Then you must work in the garden.” It was well known that Gwadanans had the Good Magic of growing things. “The Strange Ones love flowers. It is a small aid to us in our troubles.”

  —

  THE SET OF THREE ROOMS that Percy Shabrill called “the servants’ wing” had been built to house six adults and a golden retriever. Since the passage of the Natives Land Act the previous year, its occupancy had risen to twenty-seven. Mrs. Mafuduka enjoyed Dorothy Shabrill’s total trust and found it hard to turn away refugees. By the time most country people reached Johannesburg, they were in bad physical shape. The air of these rooms was far from sweet-smelling. Each had a job, nominal or actual, in the preparation of the Shabrill homestead. The pitiful sum paid them was augmented by a generous provision of wholes
ome food—to the expense of which Dorothy Shabrill turned a blind eye when brought the provisioners’ bills.

  Ntsina was almost ashamed, in this company, that his family had not been thrown off their land. It was clearer every day what mischiefs the spirits he had helped liberate had accomplished. How else could one explain such viciousness and greed? He heard stories of white farmers turning on workers they had known since childhood; of old ladies thrown out in the snow, and dead children buried in hedgerows. He knew that wicked spirits had roamed abroad in past ages; his grandmother had told him of the Great Slaughter of the Cattles and of many wars. But it seemed that the mines on the Rand, breaking open the hollow, secret places of the earth, work that he himself had undertaken for the lure of money and a radio, were unleashing Bad Magic in undreamed-of quantities. He thought of the sadness in the face of the white woman who had saved him. Perhaps the Strange Ones also were afflicted.

  The man whose sleeping blanket Ntsina was assigned to share was the backyard refugee best versed in the ways of Europeans: Luvo Yako, who poured the Shabrills’ cocktails. Luvo could write and speak fluent isiXhosa, English, German and Afrikaans, having been educated by German missionaries in the town of Cradock, in the upper valley of the Great Fish River. In the care of his teachers he had grasped the grammars of four languages and learned more than ten thousand irregular verbs. Current circumstances now obliged him to devote his prodigious memory to the alcoholic preferences of the Shabrills’ guests.

  At their little school in Cradock, with its neat Victorian streets, Luvo’s German teachers had stressed the virtues of self-reliance, scholarship and allegiance to the Ten Commandments. He had read every book in the mission’s small library and committed long swathes of Goethe and the Bible to heart.

  “How are you, brother?” asked Ntsina.

  “I am well,” said Luvo.

  But this was a terrible lie.

  —

  THE MISSION SCHOOL where Luvo had been head boy was eight hours’ walk from the farm the Yakos had tilled for six generations. The school was an enclosed world, separated from outside events by a timetable of Teutonic precision. The husband and wife who ran it were so horrified by the Natives Land Act, and its abolition of property rights for non-whites in fourteen-fifteenths of the country, that they had sheltered their students as long as possible from knowledge of its existence. This well-meaning decision had the unintended consequence of depriving their pupils’ parents of the support of their male offspring at the moment of crisis. When Luvo learned what had happened, he ran most of the way home to discover the cluster of huts in which he had lived since birth occupied by a strange and hostile family. This family, he was told by a neighbour, had handed all their animals to the white farmer who owned the fields the Yakos had sown. They had accepted his terms of servitude: a wage of two pounds a month for the father, with ten shillings per son and five for daughters. Luvo knew in his heart that his father would never accept such iniquity—he who often made one hundred and fifty pounds a year from the judicious breeding of cattles. From farm to farm he went, seeking his family, but he encountered only unknown, distraught faces. Some offered Luvo a meal of mealie pap; others told him, as though it were his fault, that they had nothing to share. At length he found, shivering on the side of the road, surrounded by dying animals (for the evictions had taken place in midwinter, just as the goats were kidding), a distant cousin who told him that his parents had gone to Cradock to find him.

  Back Luvo raced, sleeping only when exhaustion crippled him; if not oblivious to the cold, then fortified against it by panic. There are many paths across the mountains to Cradock, and he prayed ceaselessly to God to lead him to his parents and sister. On the seventh day, God did. He found them in a ravine, close to sunset, burying his sister’s two-year-old baby; and when his mother saw him, she who had not wept once, who had supported her husband’s decision to refuse slavery on any terms, even as she saw that freedom in a stolen land was meaningless; she, whom the village rascals had feared, who had raised her children on the strictest principles, gave way and wailed so loudly that even in that remote place, and at that grave hour, her husband shushed her for fear the police would hear.

  “Why are you here?” asked Ntsina, who could tell Luvo came from the Cape.

  “Why are any of us here?” asked Luvo, dryly.

  —

  THE BAROLS KNEW the value of a first impression, and did not intend to be seen emerging from a second-class train carriage by the Shabrills. Neither did their current situation permit the financing of two first-class tickets to Johannesburg. They solved this dilemma simply. Piet purchased a single first-class ticket and Stacey dressed to the nines. She had the demimondaine’s sense of the value of clothes, and had taken pains to treat her dresses well. As they boarded the train, she made a great show of dropping her ticket on the track. It was an old one and was soon taken by the wind. A chivalrous guard told her not to worry the slightest bit about it.

  Thus it was that Percy Shabrill, who had come to the station for the pleasure of being present when Piet saw his Packard for the first time, had no reason to suspect that his guests were not in the possession of a substantial private income.

  Piet Barol was deeply disturbed by his failure to do better than Percy Shabrill. Than Percy Shabrill! Piet knew himself to be cleverer and more discerning than Percy. That these advantages were not reflected in their current circumstances was alarming. Since their parting on the Cape Town docks six and a half years before, having shared a cabin all the way from Europe, Piet had mentally divided by many times Percy’s tales of success, unleashed in occasional letters full of typographical errors. Confronted by Percy in the flesh, he saw that Percy was rich.

  “Shabrill!” he said. “You look devilishly well.”

  —

  PERCY TOOK THEM FIRST to the new house. The last square of lawn had been laid and a picnic set under fully grown oaks he had bought from a farm near Potchefstroom.

  “Who has the time to wait for trees to grow? Jolly sight worse than watching paint dry.” He laughed and Dorothy blanched inwardly. She hoped Percy would not shame himself by being over-eager for his guests’ approval. She looked across the lawn, where Esmé was approaching.

  Esmé was the Shabrills’ five-year-old daughter. She was spoiled, and inclined to unloveable displays of temper if thwarted. Dorothy knew firmness was called for, but she could rarely stop herself from giving her daughter exactly what she wanted. This had begun as an expression of love, but lately fear had entered her motivation—for Esmé had her father’s stubborn determination and knew that poor behaviour in public was a powerful weapon against her mother.

  “Come sit by Mummy,” said Dorothy.

  But Esmé walked straight past her, right up to Stacey, and said in a voice of wonder: “What a pretty lady.”

  As Stacey Barol squeezed Esmé to her, she wondered whether the furniture for the vast and empty mansion behind them had yet been ordered, and did her best to concentrate on the little girl. She was rather a poppet. Esmé had dark curls and a snub nose and bright blue eyes. The adoration in them fortified Stacey. She looked at Esmé’s father. It was clear from the look on Percy’s face that intimacy with his daughter would be well received. “When is your birthday, my darling?” she asked. “I am going to give you a marvellous present.”

  “In sixty-eight sleeps I will be six,” said Esmé proudly.

  Stacey kissed her all over her face, and handed her back to her nanny. Esmé comported herself like a paragon of childhood virtue. Dorothy had never seen her so acquiescent. A little dagger pierced her heart, its point poisoned with the knowledge that another woman could achieve what she could not.

  “You’ve been so clever with this garden, Mr. Shabrill,” said Stacey.

  —

  THE BAROLS WERE RELIEVED to be told that they would be sleeping at the Carlton Hotel, the Shabrills being “all at sixes and sevens.”

  “I won’t hear of you paying your bill,”
said Percy grandly. And when Piet protested too vigorously, Stacey silenced him with a glance. As soon as they were alone, she undressed and went to bed. She was a great believer in afternoon naps. Piet took a bath. He lay submerged in scalding water, his heart thudding. When he emerged an hour later, he toweled himself dry in the dressing room of their suite. He tried to feel sure of success, but tonight he doubted himself; and another man’s doubt can rarely be disguised from a highly competitive male. This Percy Shabrill certainly was. Piet was used to being pleased by his reflection and sought the old remedy. He had a high colour from his bath and his eyes were their magnificent blue. But even when he pulled his shoulders back there was no disguising his changed silhouette, nor the fact that its narrowest point was no longer his waist. He dressed quickly.

  The tail suit he put on called him to the other side of his twenties: to a slimmer, more certain self drinking champagne on a star-filled night in Amsterdam. That boy seemed lost to him. He sucked in his stomach to close the trousers, which had already been let out two full inches. His wife appeared at the door from the bedroom, quite naked. She looked at him for several moments without being seen, an expression on her face that was at first inscrutable and then—at once; intensely—tender. She crossed the room and stood close behind him. Sleep had soothed her feelings. They looked at one another in the mirror, and Piet put a hand on her thigh and pulled her towards him. She put her arms around his neck. She was wearing a perfume he had given her for their first Christmas together, which she had wisely preserved. Its scent conveyed its expense without being remotely ostentatious.