Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  Nosakhe’s small victory in the matter of the weather spell did not compensate for a great setback. She had sent messengers to all the Princes between Gwadana and King William’s Town, bringing glad tidings from the descendants of the Great Founder of Gwadana, and summoning them to a feast. She had also sent good spirits to ripen their minds with thoughts of retaliation against the British. All had accepted, with extravagant words of thanks and praise. They had been invited for the night before, and only as she watched the bride’s party approaching did Nosakhe finally admit to herself that none of them would come.

  It made her furious with them. It was clear—had been growing clearer for years—that her battle with Atamaraka was entering a new and deadlier phase. Of course the goddess would have closed the Chiefs’ minds to the idea of patching up old enmities. “But even a goddess can only tempt, never force,” she said under her breath, hearing the voices rising from below. And she wondered what the Bantu would do if their leaders continued to behave so unworthily.

  Bela wore her hair in the oldest hairstyle in the land of the tribes: brushed up into two lobes and held in place by a paste of her mother’s concocting. Her attendants stood beside her, and her cousins guarded her. Since she was a little girl she had dreamed of her marriage. She had been prepared for ugliness in her husband, but in truth Ntsina’s nose charmed her, and she had caught his smell on the breeze.

  As they reached the top of the escarpment, the ladies fell to ululating, making the high-pitched shrieks with which Xhosa women signify momentous events. The Chief himself welcomed Bela, and she was not insensible to this honour. It made her annoyed at Zandi’s sulky face. “Twist your mouth into shape,” she said under her breath, as they were shown into the bridal hut.

  Bela had not found a moment to use the latrine. Now she must be still and silent as her in-laws inspected her. She wanted badly to urinate but the horror of embarrassing herself kept her bladder controlled. It meant that she was thinking her own thoughts, barely conscious of Sukude as he looked closely at her neck, her hands, her feet, as if inspecting a prized cattle.

  Nosakhe, who did not care for housework, was delighted with the gift Ma had given her in this wholesome young woman. “You will do well, my dear,” she said, and left to attend to the feasting, feeling light of heart.

  —

  PIET BAROL HAD WASHED his own shirt. He put it on in his hut, by the light of a lantern. No mirror was available, but it did not matter what he looked like to these natives. He put his head out of the door and called Luvo’s name at the top of his voice.

  Luvo was in Ntsina’s hut, helping him dress. Ntsina had asked him to be a member of the groom’s party. It was the first time Luvo had ever assisted so prominently at a wedding, and it made him feel manly and grown up. He had spent all day grinding soft white rock and water into a smooth paste. White was Nosakhe’s colour, the colour of a witch doctor, and she had decreed that Ntsina must wear white beneath his leopard-skin kaross. Ntsina stood before his friend. They had all drunk a little beer and the sounds of merriment outside filled them with anticipation.

  “You are a lucky bastard,” said Kagiso. He was speaking to Ntsina, and he meant that he was lucky to have Bela as his bride. But Luvo, hearing the words, accepted them in secret for himself—for he felt lucky indeed. He plunged his hands into the white paste and began to smear it across Ntsina’s chest. Living, as he had from birth, at the top of a hill, Ntsina had never had an ounce of fat. As a boy he had been skinny, his rib cage visible through the stretched skin of his torso. Months in Johannesburg hammering rock had added muscle to his frame, and as Luvo rubbed his chest Ntsina made his muscles stand out, for he was proud of them. Luvo had never before touched another man in this way, and he understood that he would never do it again. To be able to take this pleasure in public, with no thought of censure, even among these superstitious natives, shielded his conscience from the wrath of the Hebrew God. He pressed the paste down Ntsina’s navel, across the smooth ridges of his abdominals. Kagiso dipped his hands in it too, and was about to touch Ntsina’s back when Luvo, with the impulsive creativity of lust, said: “Your hands are dirty from the blood of the goat. There must be no red in this.” And since this was true, Kagiso desisted, and Luvo continued his task.

  He rubbed the paste across Ntsina’s shoulders and down his back, into the hollow curve above his buttocks. He had taken care to strap himself tightly beneath his traditional blanket skirt, and to position his cock between his legs—so that his erection was neither visible nor inhibited. He felt light-headed with pleasure. He took his time over each of Ntsina’s arms, careful to get between the indentations of his triceps, and twice when Ntsina wriggled their bodies touched, and Luvo felt his friend’s solidity, and stored this with every other detail of the experience to revisit at his leisure.

  He was intensely displeased when he heard Piet Barol shout his name, for he had not yet done Ntsina’s hands. He ignored the summons, but Piet called louder and louder, and in the end Ntsina said: “I can do my fingers alone, brother. You had better see what the Strange One wants.”

  Luvo took himself to Piet’s hut in a towering rage, and was quite discombobulated to be met with radiant affection. “You are a civilized man, unlike these natives, good natured as they are.” Piet clapped him on the back. He was full of plans. “Can you in all good conscience, as a Christian, encourage their superstitions?”

  The Bible contains many cautions against false belief, and Luvo did not need them listed for him. “No,” he said, putting away the recollection of Ntsina’s taut chest.

  “We must teach them how to pray for the souls of their ancestors as we pray for ours—in a church, before a cross.”

  “I doubt very much that you will get the trees you want,” said Luvo.

  “I might not get them alone. But with you, my friend…” Piet hesitated, remembering the many white men who had cautioned him against being too generous with Kaffirs. Then he pressed on, thinking well of himself. “When we were in the forest, you asked for a hundred pounds. That is a large sum and I did not commit to it. I wanted to see what you were made of.” He put his hand on Luvo’s shoulder. “I can see you are a person of rare quality. If you help me get the wood, I will give you three hundred pounds once we have delivered the furniture.”

  His words hung between them, glowing in the cold air.

  “They will never give you an Ancestor Tree.”

  “I will pay them handsomely for it. And I will pay for a church to be built here, as soon as Shabrill has paid us. The desire to pray for one’s forebears is a good one, but they must pray in the right way.”

  For one brought up with the conviction that there is only one route to heaven, this was a potent argument. Luvo stopped frowning.

  “A man can set himself up for life on three hundred pounds,” Piet went on. “And take care of his parents, so that they need no longer live in the house of people who are strange to them.”

  Luvo said nothing. Had this man been sent by God, to help him care for his family and reach the great English King? Piet looked like a vigorous angel by the light of the lantern; quite unlike the pictures of wicked men in the illustrated manuals on ethics that formed the larger part of the Mission School’s library. Luvo thought of the Gwadanans. They had been generous hosts, but they would not be saved while they clung to their superstitions. “One tree,” he said. “One tree must be enough for you.”

  “One tree will be,” said Piet. “I give you my word.”

  —

  SUKUDE WAS ONE of the three people in the village of Gwadana to possess a mirror, and he contemplated himself in it that evening with sullen satisfaction. He had donned the skin of a handsome leopard he had killed with his own assegai. He was fatter than he had been as a young man, but still strong. He flexed his muscles, thinking petulantly of all that had been denied him by Ntsina’s abrupt return. He felt a hatred of his mother-in-law burn his insides. Who was she to forbid a powerful man the satisfaction of h
is natural wants? He had posed the question many times before, and there was no answer to it.

  In the bridal hut, Bela was so conscious of her own good fortune that she felt sympathy for Zandi. While her attendants fetched the ochre, she took her sister’s hand and said: “You will always be an honoured guest in my homestead.”

  Zandi looked at her warily. “You will never ask me here. Once you are married you will forget me.” And then—she could not help it; the truth rose unstoppably from within her: “Everyone will forget me.”

  Bela was shocked to see Zandi’s tears, for Zandi never cried in her presence, no matter how she wept alone. She squeezed her hand. “I think Kagiso likes you. Tonight, when he is drunk, you must give him a sign that you like him too. Just think! He is my husband’s best friend. The son of a Chief. What glory it would bring on our house if you were to marry him. Even”—for she could not quite stifle the impulse to honesty—“as his second wife.”

  Zandi said nothing. It was typical of Bela to lace her kindness with this sort of poison, and she was angry with herself for crying. Their mother entered the hut. She was splendidly dressed, in blankets of orange wool with bracelets stitched with tinkling shells. She wore across her shoulders the beaded collar her grandmother had worn as a bride, and in her hand she carried a long wooden pipe trimmed in copper. Seeing her daughters together made her very happy; and Mama Jaxa was in any case a cheerful woman. “How lucky you are, Bela,” she cried, “to have a new mother whose spells command the weather!”

  It took three hours for Bela to be painted red from head to foot, and a further hour for her bridal blankets to be draped to perfection. Her maidens covered themselves in ochre too, and draped their blankets as she waited, contemplating her reflection in the shard of mirror her mother had brought. She was well pleased. Black cloths were wrapped tightly over the young women’s heads, and left to hang in front. For the first time Bela felt a tingling of nerves—the nerves of any first lady facing a large audience on the opening night of a great drama.

  The door burst open and a little girl put her head round it. “The cow is being slaughtered!”

  —

  AS SUKUDE ENTERED the kraal, watched by all their guests, he scoffed at his mother-in-law in the privacy of his own head. What a jumped-up charlatan! She had failed to see into his soul, for all her gift of Farsight. He sliced into the cow with a knife just behind her horns, the cow that must cry to signal the approval of the ancestors.

  She submitted without a murmur.

  Sukude twisted the knife, his heart rate rising. The cow was clearly alive. He withdrew the knife and drove it in again, savagely. But she made no sound.

  As an omen, this was bad indeed. Sukude had never been present at a ritual slaughter at which the cow did not cry, but he knew—everyone knew—that it was an indication of grave displeasure from the ancestors. The laughter in the watching crowd died down. Nosakhe stood rooted to the spot, and Ata the dog began to bark. Sweat dripped from Sukude’s brow down his face; his hands were slippery with blood. Perhaps Nosakhe had been fooled, but the ancestors knew his dark heart. He gave the cow a terrible kick, right in her uterus, a kick that held all the force he was capable of.

  At last she bleated. It was a plaintive bleat, not at all what was looked for, but at least the cow had not lain silent to be slaughtered. The guests, wanting a party, and too polite to draw attention to this scandal, raised their tankards of beer and shouted. All save Bela’s father, whose blood had turned to iced salt water. Standing at the front, he had been close enough to see that it was not Sukude’s knife that made the cow cry, but his boot; and this brought to the surface many unspoken worries he had about consigning his daughter to this family’s care. He was seized by an instinctive, reflex wish to return the hundred cattles and six bulls and to reclaim his darling daughter. But his wife’s eyes found his over the clearing that separated the male from the female guests, and in her look was the knowledge that they could not go back now; it would be a scandal that reverberated for generations, leaving both their girls unmarriageable.

  The bridegroom appeared, as white as a statue carved from rock. He was flanked by Luvo and Kagiso and several of his closest boyhood friends. Ntsina looked magnificent in his way, thought Piet, envying the young man his splendid physique.

  Ntsina was hung with all the beads of the Zinis; they fell in ropes from his neck, gripped his head in a white band edged in blue. The crowd parted, men on one side, ladies on the other. An immense shout went up, and above it the high ululations of the women, which made the gulls on the cliffs far beyond soar skywards.

  As Ntsina’s procession passed him, Piet pulled Luvo’s shoulder. “Stay with me. I wish to understand.”

  Luvo was relieved to be spared the ordeal of sitting beside his friend at the moment of his union to a woman. He hung back. “The bride will come out soon,” he said. “They will meet each other on this grass mat.”

  “And then go into the kraal? Is that where the ceremony will take place?”

  “There is no ceremony in the native tradition. And the bride most certainly will not enter the kraal. She may not enter her husband’s kraal until her first child is a year old. It would be considered a grave crime.”

  Piet stored all these details, looking forward to the day he might recount his presence at a Xhosa wedding at the Mount Nelson Hotel. The wails from the crowd rose. Five young women appeared, dressed in red blankets, with black headdresses veiling their faces.

  “We are not meant to know which one the bride is,” said Luvo.

  But in the case of Bela Jaxa, everyone knew.

  She was a foot taller than her attendants, and her presence inspired an audible intake of breath from those watching. Her mother felt a delirious pride. A pride that made her eyes fill with tears and obliterated her concerns for Zandi’s future, and the troubling omen. She looked at her husband and his glance met hers. Together they contemplated the perfection they had brought into the world.

  Jealous male eyes looked at Ntsina, acknowledging his strength but thinking, on the whole, that they had better noses. It was part of Bela’s gift that her beauty did not inspire hostility in other women; she was too kind and merry for that.

  Piet could see she was a beauty of her type, but he did not, he told himself, care for native women. He thought instead of how he and Stacey had met, and how impulsively they had married.

  For the time it takes a gull to sweep from the top of the cliffs to catch a silver fish, husband and wife looked at one another.

  “I see you, my wife,” said Ntsina.

  “I see you, my husband.” And this time there was no maidenly modesty in Bela’s glance. She looked right into Ntsina’s eyes, taking in the body she now might claim; and even his nose was endearing to her.

  “I will take no other wife,” said Ntsina.

  “And I no other husband.”

  —

  THEN THE FEAST really started. Store huts were thrown open, revealing vats of pink, frothy beer and sheep fat, already prepared, and loaf upon loaf of bread with the mysterious, smoky flavour of the anthill ovens in which it had been baked. The Jaxas’ guests and the Zinis’ began singing at full voice—different songs, that clashed and twisted round one another in a glorious competition. Bela’s father had brought brandy, crate upon crate of it, and with Nosakhe’s permission (for she was known to distrust the goods of the Strange Ones) it was liberally served. The guests drank in a rush and grew drunk as one body. Goatskin bags full of finely ground dagga and tobacco were produced, and the children went from adult to adult filling long, slender-stemmed pipes, which were lit by embers from the fire on which the cow Sukude had slaughtered was roasting.

  A village barred by long-standing feuds from discourse with its neighbours must needs know how to make its own fun, and this the people of Gwadana undoubtedly did.

  Noni heard Piet’s voice congratulating Ntsina. She had grown up on tales of Strange Ones coming from the depths of the sea to cause havoc
in the lands of the tribes, and a demonic green seeped into the noise made by the dancers. She began to be afraid and called for her brothers, but each was lost in the dancing. She who knew every inch of the village was literally in the dark in this strange homestead at the top of the cliffs, full of adults whose speech was slurred, whose breath rasped heavy in their throats. She began to wail, but no one heard her, and the village children did not approach her, afraid of her closed eyes that saw so much.

  Sukude stifled the urge to kick the screaming brat only because she was the daughter of a Chief, and the Chief was near at hand. He began to find it impossible to live another day without mounting a lovely female. He looked at the dancers. He knew there were women among them he might have, and willingly too; but he also knew how hard it is to keep such a secret. And secret his coupling must be, now that he had lost the only means of taking a woman openly and with honour. Lundi sidled up to him, a cup of brandy in his hand. “Your son will return to the mines soon enough,” he murmured, reading Sukude’s thoughts. “So long as she is not pregnant…” He left the sentence tantalizingly unfinished.

  But Sukude doubted that Ntsina would ever return to the mines, since he had a new white friend to make him rich, and in any case the animal in him knew that Bela would be pregnant sooner rather than later. He had done his investigations well and knew she was a virgin. He had looked at her closely as she revealed herself to her husband for the first time, thinking painfully that it should have been his eyes she stared into. She was obviously looking forward to her first sexing, and he knew that women who are happy with their husbands conceive quickly. He shook his fist at the clear heavens and the twinkling stars. “Give me that brandy,” he said, and he took the mug from Lundi’s hand and drank its contents in a single gulp that left him full of inward fire.

  —

  IT DID ZANDI’S SPIRITS no end of good to be bowed to by a handsome Strange One, who then asked her name, and told her his, and said “It is an honour to meet you on this happy occasion” in her own language. She was not used to being the object of other women’s jealousy, but she saw as she hung on Piet’s arm that she was. It made her cling tighter, and when he offered to fetch a drink for her she accepted graciously. As Piet was making his way to the hut from which drinks were being dispensed, Zandi said to Luvo: “Does your Strange One like black girls?”