Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  “Fezile! Now!”

  On the beach, Fezile had calmed down. He was about to desert his post when he saw Nosakhe’s head rise up through the waves. She was much further down the beach, but closer to shore than he had expected. The Gate to the Underworld must be open, which meant that Atamaraka was close at hand.

  With a shriek that made the cattles low and the goats bleat and the gulls rise cawing from the cliffs, Fezile ran up the beach, away from the Sea. He ran as fast as he had run as a boy. He ran and ran and did not stop. A pain rose in his side and spread to his arm, and still he did not stop. Pure fear gave him the energy of a god. He ran and ran, his wizened heart pumping faster. He ran up the dunes, and onto level ground. He ran past homesteads and fences. The pain in his arm became excruciating, and still he ran. He ran until his straining heart shuddered its last. He saw Lundi’s homestead, and Lundi himself, standing at the door. But already his blood had stopped carrying oxygen to his brain, and the last thing he saw was Lundi’s horrified face.

  And then he died.

  —

  NONI HEARD NOSAKHE’S SHOUT. And then Fezile’s scream. She heard Fezile run up the beach, away from the sea, and Ata the dog start barking. Nosakhe called again. Her blue had faded. The sincerity remained, but its strength was failing. Noni was a kind-hearted little girl. At once she understood that Nosakhe had gone where Xhosa children are told never to venture.

  She ran into her homestead, screaming. Her family were at breakfast, their usual good humour stifled by a new atmosphere of sullen reproach.

  “Nosakhe Zini is in the Sea!”

  Confusion reigned. The Chief got his spear and hurried to the door. But Kagiso charged past him, for he knew what use a spear is against the waters. Nosakhe had treated him kindly and often fed him deliciously as a child. He ran onto the beach. The sea was empty. He stopped, panting.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “She’s there! In the waves!”

  “There is no one there.” Kagiso turned back.

  The frustration of not being believed at this critical hour was more than Noni could bear. She remembered the ceremony Fezile had conducted, and the attention the adults had paid it. In a voice that was no longer the voice of a little girl, she said: “Nosakhe Zini is in the sea. I, who have the gift of Farsight, command you to save her.”

  Her father and his wives gathered behind her. They had never heard her use this voice, and they were wondering what to do when Nosakhe’s head appeared above the waves, and they heard her faint cry: “Feziiiiilllleeee!”

  Kagiso charged down the beach. The tide was rising, surging towards the sand and bringing Nosakhe with it. He ran on the shingle at the water’s edge, where the purchase of feet is best. When he was level with her, he plunged into the sea and waded towards her. He waded until his feet could no longer touch the bottom, and there was a moment when he might have retreated. But he was a brave man, and he trusted his sister’s protection. So he launched himself into the depths, splashing his hands to keep afloat, and one of his hands connected with the heavy robes Nosakhe wore, and he pulled with all his might. Now his father was in the sea, and the Chief waded out on the sand shelf to its edge, and his first wife Pumza followed.

  When the Chief reached the edge of the shelf, Pumza was holding one of his hands, her solid bulk a useful weight against the tides. His hand found Kagiso’s, and the turning tide rose up and a huge wave sent Nosakhe’s body towards the shore. She was lifeless and very heavy. The Chief and Kagiso and Pumza dragged her to the beach. She lay crumpled on the sand, and each of those watching prayed to their Ancestors for help. But it was Noni who pushed Nosakhe’s body onto her side and gave her back a great clap.

  It was this clap that jolted the last of Nosakhe’s reflexes to life. Her body contracted, every muscle straining, and her stomach expelled a great quantity of seawater. As it did, her lungs rejoiced in the air once more, and her heart gave a great leap.

  She started to breathe.

  10

  Piet Barol set Ierephaan and Mohammed up in a large, open-sided workshop. He was aware that each wished to outshine the other, and was judicious with his compliments. He had decided to complete Shabrill’s commission room by room, starting with Percy’s study. The desk was supported on elegant gazelle legs, the chairs inspired by bushbuck. Where Chippendale had favoured meaningless curls and curlicues, Piet’s designs caught the symmetry of the sable antelope’s horns, while supporting the lumbar spine. Percy’s chair had a back inspired by the majestic revolutions of the horns of the bull kudu miraculously reduced to two dimensions. Piet set Brightness and Blessing to study the work of the Indian masters, and drew Ntsina to one side.

  “Would you like to learn a skill?” He did not wish Ntsina to have no options save menial service when his earnings from this commission ran out. “When you live in the city, you might have need of one.”

  “I will not cut an Ancestor Tree.”

  “You needn’t. We have so much work to do with the forest mahogany. You have such a knowledge of animals, I thought you might—”

  “If you wish.” Ntsina spoke gruffly because he wanted Piet to ask him what was wrong. He was ready to answer this question in no uncertain terms. But Piet was too cheerful to notice his partner’s low spirits, and as soon as he had shown Ntsina how to use a gouge, he was on his way again.

  Conscious of his wife’s scrutiny, he took care to get everyone busy before he began to work himself. He had not slept all night, knowing that his encounter with an Ancestor Tree was upon him. He was uncontainably excited. With Grace and Wisdom, he began sawing the outlines of the bed. The wood gave way, once stripped of its bark. Its colour was delicate, lighter than mahogany, perfect for the bright sun of the Rand. He set his assistants to hollow out the space between the base and the posts and the canopy, and went into the forest with Happiness and an axe.

  Over the days it took his assistants to prepare the rough block, Piet cut down twenty-eight small trees, testing the wood of each for resistance, quality and colour. His nerves were alive. He was in a state that only artists ever know—when their minds are as impressionable as clay. He drank in the atmosphere of the forest and filled a notebook with what he saw—the twisting of a vine on a trunk, the mischievous grin of a squirrel. When he came home at night, he was so happy that Stacey found herself better able to rise above the inconveniences of her accommodations.

  Piet’s explorations accumulated a pile of treasures—woods of different hues and grains, some pale and soft, capable of taking detail as fine as the veins of a leaf, some dark and hard. After days of searching he found a lime tree, which is ideal for the carving of flowers, and that night he fucked Stacey till dawn and the sound of rising men stopped them.

  Ntsina, sitting up late by the fire, heard them and felt very bitter. Every mark of affection between the Barols fuelled his indignation. He tried to concentrate on his carpentry lessons, but the Indians were proud and did not believe that a Bantu could rise to the challenges of their art. This made Ntsina much less inclined to try. Besides, he was a man made for the outdoors, for the exhilarations of the chase and merrymaking with his friends. The concentration required of the fine carver bored him and gave him headaches—he who had never sat at a desk, nor wished to.

  Luvo, trying to help, favoured him with long lectures on the importance of acquiring a trade. These had quite the opposite effect from the one intended. After one of them, Ntsina got so cross he carried Luvo to the stream for a good dunking. Luvo clung tight to Ntsina’s neck, his hands meeting behind it, his face buried against his friend’s hard chest. When Ntsina deposited him in a pool, Luvo dragged him in and they thrashed in the clear water, their bodies locked against each other.

  And Ntsina found thereafter that Luvo’s behaviour grew more provocative, not less.

  —

  IN JOHANNESBURG, Percy Shabrill said to Dorothy: “What the devil’s become of that wretched Frenchman?” The world war had created many opportunities
for influential men to dine together. That his house should not be ready to advertise his prominence made Percy irascible. The garden had taken root and looked much older than it was. The mauve hangings had been taken down. The table at which the Barols had eaten remained in the dining room, and the staff quarters were still packed with refugees, but Percy Shabrill was not a man who did things by halves, and he objected to making do in the vast rooms constructed to show off everything of the best. He and Dorothy continued to live in the house in which Esmé had been born, which was pleasant enough. But it was not the setting for a future member of Parliament.

  “I heard from his wife this morning,” said Dorothy, putting down her toast and handing Percy an envelope. “She writes to say they have found a first-class wood, of a kind no one else has.”

  Percy scanned the letter. Stacey had enclosed Piet’s latest sketches. He rather liked the idea that he had sent his man off into the hinterland, to find the best trees in all the forests of South Africa. It was a picturesque explanation for the empty house, but it did not compensate for its emptiness. He looked at his wife. He had a confession to make.

  “That furniture we ordered from England…”

  “Yes. We sent it back.”

  Percy smiled. He had deceived her, but in a good cause. He looked at her roguishly. “You didn’t really think we could send it all back, not after it had been crated up and put on a ship, did you, darling? You women have the funniest ideas.”

  Dorothy put down her teacup.

  “It’s been sitting in a shed in Potchefstroom. I rather think we should get it out and use it till Barol sends the new stuff.”

  Dorothy’s hands began to tremble. The expense of this furniture had haunted her. Only Percy’s steadfast assurance that they had got their money back had stilled her conscience. Having grown up in a vicarage, she knew the value of money.

  After a pause, she said: “You lied to me.”

  Percy guffawed, but he did so nervously. “Hardly a lie, my little wifey. I didn’t like to trouble your conscience.”

  “Well, you rather have.”

  To his great surprise, he saw that Dorothy was angry. He said no more about it, because he considered it undignified for a man to mind too much about his wife’s moods. But he loved Dorothy dearly, and as his chauffeur drove him to his office he grew quite cross at the long delay that had compelled him to bring to her attention a matter he had always intended to keep from her. By the time he reached his place of business, he was indignant. He had an agent in Cape Town, and telegraphed him instructions to visit Barol & Co. in person, to find someone for him to shout at.

  When Percy got home, Dorothy saw at once that something had disturbed him. It made her regretful of the morning’s scene. “What’s wrong, my little man?” She crossed the drawing room and put her arm through his.

  “I’ve had some rather alarming news.”

  Dorothy knew, both from the Bible and from the works of Regency-themed fiction that were her favourite refuges from the heat of the Rand, that ruin can strike even the most prosperous of men. The prospect of losing their station in life, of being freed from the obligations of the ruling class, raised her spirits. How happy they would be in an English cottage! Only guilt composed her face in a suitable expression.

  “Barol’s shop no longer exists. It’s become a bank. The word at the Mount Nelson is that he went off to fight in France.”

  She absorbed this in silence.

  “If that scoundrel has stolen my money, I’ll make sure he doesn’t live to boast of it.”

  —

  STACEY BAROL’S GRACIOUSNESS to her husband’s Bantu employees did not thrive in the forest heat. To a certain kind of mosquito, the blood of the hairless ape woman is far sweeter than her mate’s, and Stacey was soon a celebrity among the forest’s invertebrates. By day and by night they assaulted her. Every time her hand lay still, a fly settled on it. Every time she tried to sleep, the whine of a legion of bloodsucking insects disturbed her. Her husband’s physical attentions were some compensation, but the nights were hot and sticky and she was aware of the other men’s close proximity. The way Ntsina looked at her after a night of adventurous delirium made her sizzle with rage.

  Stacey did not discipline Ntsina, but she stopped going out of her way to be agreeable to him. She was no cook, and the only domestic contribution she could make was the washing of dishes—an odious practice to a lady of aristocratic tastes.

  Twelve people eating three times a day generate a quantity of dishes, and the cleaning of them in a forest is no simple matter. Water had to be fetched from the stream, which required venturing from the clearing alone. This water had to be heated on a fire that had to be laid and lit. If she did not handle the disbursement of hot and cold judiciously, she was left with a basin of greasy suds too cool to dissolve the animal fat.

  Luvo took pleasure in the rituals of cleanliness, and when Stacey volunteered to assist him he was a patient instructor. But he prized diligence in a student, and in the matter of grease scraping Stacey was not diligent. At first he let her alone, not wishing to criticize. But a succession of meals eaten off slippery plates compelled him to intervene. Stacey was secretly relieved to have these duties taken from her, but she found the indolence that followed hard to bear.

  All the men were working happily. With nothing else to do, she turned her total attention to the education of her child. She spent each morning doing Arthur’s lessons, but the boy was so enchanted by the forest she could not keep him long at a desk, learning European capitals. Arthur still cuddled her, and could not sleep without a story from her, but she knew that in his waking hours he would rather be elsewhere than with her. For the first time in his life, she was no longer the person he preferred above all others—and her demotion grieved her.

  —

  ARTHUR BAROL had a child’s natural adaptability and did not notice the mosquitoes or the flies. He was afraid only of the spiders, and some of those in Gwadana were fearsome to behold. Stacey later came to regret that at her first encounter with a huge, hairy arachnid she had screamed for Ntsina to remove it.

  Ntsina knew that it is not the ugly spiders that are dangerous, but the beautiful ones. He lifted the creature gently in cupped hands and took it outside, ignoring Stacey’s sharp instructions to kill it.

  This single act earned him Arthur Barol’s total adoration.

  Christmas came and went, chairs and desks and tables took form and the friendship of Arthur Barol and Ntsina Zini flourished. The child’s fears of the forest, derived from fairy tales, vanished when his little hand was clasped in Ntsina’s big one. His uncontained admiration made Ntsina feel better about the shapeless lumps of wood that were all that resulted from his lessons with the Indians. He found his resentment of Arthur’s parents burdensome.

  In their first months in the forest he had felt very close to Piet, and grateful for his assistance. Piet’s decision to permit a woman in the camp sounded the first note of discord between them, but because Piet did not trouble himself to delve into Ntsina’s feelings, he was entirely unaware of this. In the New Year, at Stacey’s insistence, Piet stopped eating with the other men. He and his wife took their meals in their own quarters, where they ate off china, rather than tin. In subtle ways, the inequity of the outside world stole into the clearing of the Ancestor Grove, and a suffocating rage infiltrated Ntsina’s soul.

  Only with Arthur was he free of it. He taught him the Xhosa words for “tree” and “leaf” and “stream” and “spider” and “frog” and “fruit” and “monkey.” The boy’s wonder fed his spirit, and lifted the film of habituation from Ntsina’s view of the glories all around him.

  “Our child is forgetting which race he belongs to,” said Stacey one morning, watching Arthur gambol into the forest, holding Ntsina’s hand. She tried to sound unconcerned, but there was a tightness in her throat.

  “It’s good for him to be amongst men.” Piet kissed her neck. “To learn how to hunt and take care
of himself.”

  She did not answer. But as the summer heat intensified she did complain of many things about which he could do nothing: the temperature, the flies, the mosquitoes, the spiders. Stacey did not mention her loneliness, and had she done so he might have heard her complaints more tenderly. Instead he shielded himself from them; and as the hot weeks passed, and her bickering grew tiresome, he began to channel his love for her towards an idealized, abstract vision, which lived in his own head and could not be contaminated by the fault she found with everything.

  In the forest, Ntsina taught Arthur the mating call of the female Lula bird. Many a male arrived in the clearing, plumage fluffed, to find disappointment awaiting him. The boy was at an age when learning anything is possible, if the heart is engaged. The rituals of English spelling could not compete with the thrill of summoning a wild creature. As Ntsina’s pupil he began to hear the sound of each bird and insect distinctly, and to follow the conversations of different species in the forest’s continual chatter. His brain, so ripe for languages, caught the curls and razor edges of isiXhosa, and Ntsina’s delight at his proficiency spurred him to heights of concentration he rarely displayed in the hot little shack in which his mother taught him how to count in French.

  One morning, escaping the quiet industry of the camp to see what they could see, they found their portion of the forest mysteriously empty. They were looking for the baboons, but none were to be found. No other monkeys leapt through the trees. No deer grazed by the side of the streams. The emptiness puzzled Ntsina, and then made him grin. “Come, I will show you a something,” he said. “But it is a long way off, and I cannot carry you. When a human tastes a Blessing for the first time, he must stand on his own two feet.”