Sacrificed

by Chanette Paul

  Ammie tried to move, groaned. Her entire body was a matrix of pain.

  The woman held a tin mug to Ammie’s swollen lips. She drank gratefully, but with effort. The goat’s milk was cool, yet burned where it touched her cracked lips. It left an herbal aftertaste.

  She was lying in a darkened room on a rug made of animal skins. A gap in the wall let in the sun. The filthy panes of the only window were cracked, one corner broken and missing.

  Her nose was blocked, forcing her to breathe through her mouth. She could taste rather than smell the stench of sewage and rotting garbage outside. Her eyelids felt swollen and grainy.

  “Elijah?” she muttered when the worst of her thirst had been quenched.

  “Elijah is dead.”

  “César ...”

  The woman’s face contorted with hatred. “Your husband is gone. The dog ran!” Her Congo-French was terse and limited. She chased flies from Ammie’s lips. “He thinks you dead. Leave you for tai and fisi.”

  Ammie recognized the Swahili words, though she didn’t speak the language. In the Congo there was enough work for vultures and hyenas to hear them mentioned quite often. She didn’t speak Lingala either, the Congo’s other lingua franca.

  There was a time when she had considered herself a loyal citizen of this country. She might not have been born here, but she had believed it was where her roots lay; it provided her with the only context in which to be herself.

  Now she knew she had always been an incomer and would always remain one. She had been as blind as the rest, living in a dream world, where it was considered unnecessary to learn the indigenous languages, get to know the locals, try to understand them. No wonder the Congo had turned its back on them. They were no more than fleas on a dog’s back that had to be brushed off.

  “Where am I?”

  “Elisabethville, but not the one you know. My kitongoji.” Her voice rang with bitterness.

  Ammie could see and smell the difference between her Elisabethville and this woman’s neighborhood. She could hear it as well. Children shouting and laughing. Drums throbbing in the distance. Women’s voices.

  Cité indigène. A city on the outskirts of a city. A city where white people didn’t go. A place to which the indigenous people had to return at night when they had finished their work in the houses and businesses of the whites because they were not welcome in white Elisabethville. At least, that was how it used to be.

  “Why are you helping me?” Since Independence, white people were the enemy. Before Independence as well, of course, but now it was official.

  “For Elijah. He was good to me. You must sleep now.”

  As if the words had magical powers her eyelids grew heavy. The herbs, Ammie realized, before she dozed off.

  Ammie

  Leuven

  “Oh, Miss Ammie, your tea has gone cold.” Lieve clicked her tongue.

  Lubumbashi. That was the new name for Elisabethville.

  Where was Elisabethville again?

  Lieve put a crocheted blanket on her lap, tucking it around her knees. “I’ll bring you a fresh pot.”

  “That’s kind of you, Lieve. What time will Luc be home from school?” The wall clock was no longer where it used to be. The room looked strange. Whose house was this?

  Lieve stroked her hair. “You haven’t seen Luc in years. He’s a professor now. Just like your first husband. You told me yourself.”

  No, my second husband. Luc’s father was my second husband. Jacq DeReu. César was the first. And after Jacq came Tobias. Three husbands. One great love. The one I never married. Elijah.

  This time she kept her thoughts to herself. The pious Lieve wouldn’t understand. Jacq hadn’t understood either.

  “Luc is no longer in Leuven.” Lieve’s voice came from far away, as if she was coming to the end of a long tale.

  “Who’s this Luc again?” Ammie closed her eyes and heard Lieve give a deep sigh.

  Caz

  Overberg

  Damn Tieneke! Spoiled her entire day with her lies. It couldn’t be true, Caz had decided after the initial shock. Tieneke just wanted to trick her into making the journey. That was all it could be.

  She was the late-born child of Josefien and Hans Colijn. Born in the H.F. Verwoerd Moedersbond Hospital on October 2, 1961. Registered as Cassandra Colijn. Raised in Pretoria. First in Rietfontein, as a baby, and later in Meyerspark, where she went to school and was confirmed in the Dopper Church. She had been Cassandra Colijn all her life, except for the eleven months her marriage lasted. How could it change now, after almost fifty-three years?

  Caz shoved the wireless mouse aside and rolled her office chair away from her desk, annoyed. She had done hardly anything all morning. What was on the screen was pure drivel. She would have to re-do the lot.

  The deadline for the translation was still some time away but it was a bloody brick of a novel. And translating from Afrikaans to English always took longer than the other way round. Moreover, the writer occasionally lapsed into the Cape dialect, which is nearly impossible to translate. Not to mention the many instances of humorous word play that made hardly any sense in English and wasn’t even remotely funny in translation.

  Correct language usage was the easy part. The challenges of translation lay elsewhere. How does one translate the voice of an author, for instance? Another person’s take on life? The heart and soul of the disembodied author behind every book?

  Word for word and sentence by sentence is how you initially translate. If that fails, you try to find the broader meaning, the author’s intention. You try to get inside his mindset, to do justice to the meaning behind the words, the sentences, the story.

  Her own present mindset wasn’t exactly helping the process along.

  Of course it wasn’t the complexity of the translation that was paralyzing her brain.

  Five words kept echoing through her mind, overriding all other words and their semantic and emotive value in any language. Biological parents. Didn’t want you.

  There was a mindset for you. Here, take this baby. I don’t want her, for reasons a, b and c. Good luck with raising a child who doesn’t share your gene pool.

  Blue eyes. That’s what Caz had in common with the rest of her family, though her eyes were a different blue. Darker, with light brown specks. Her hair was blonde like theirs but, while her mother and sister—or whatever they were to her—had straight, thin hair, and her father had been bald for as long as she could remember, Caz had thick, tightly curled hair. She’d worn it long for most of her life in an attempt to make it more manageable. Now that the blonde had turned to gray it was easier, the curls slightly more relaxed. More corkscrew than frizz.

  But what set her apart most from her sister and parents had always been her height. Where they were short and plump, she had shot up as if her shoes had been sprinkled with fertilizer. At thirteen she had already towered over her father. She had always been the tallest in her class, until some of the boys caught up with her in their last school year.

  Finally at eye level with them, she still couldn’t look them in the eye. Her awkwardness in male company was firmly rooted by then and the conviction that she was big and clumsy was an essential part of the way she viewed herself.

  When she looked in the mirror she could see her face wasn’t unattractive and her figure was well proportioned, despite her being so tall. Yet she felt unattractive. Undesirable. Different.

  Not only was she too tall, she also lacked the right background. There was no Boer general in her family tree, no Afrikaner hero who was a distant relative’s uncle or grandfather. No grandmother who had survived a Boer concentration camp.

  Josefien and Hans Colijn had arrived in South Africa in 1951, when Tieneke was a year old. They knew little about the country’s history. It was merely a place where the prospects were better. Where bakeries weren’t as pl
entiful. Where the Second World War hadn’t hit the population so hard. The same war that had made Hans leave the Netherlands to end up in Belgium, where he’d met Josefien.

  To Josefien, South Africa was the back of beyond.

  There were a number of Dutch people in Pretoria, Fien was Belgian—so they were different even in their otherness. On top of which they were Protestants, which distinguished her mother from the other Belgians.

  Yet it was because of her distinctive looks that Hentie had noticed Caz, as unbelievable as she had found it at the time.

  He had liked the fact that she was tall. “At least I can look you in the eye,” he’d said the night they met at the agricultural students’ barn dance in Potchefstroom. It wasn’t completely true, of course, since he was still a good ten centimeters taller than Caz.

  And Hentie was crazy about her hair. He had raked his fingers through her curls that first evening when he kissed her goodbye at her residence. Her very first breath-taking kiss.

  He found her reticence endearing. Maybe because he mistook it for timidity and failed to perceive the ire it masked.

  She, on the other hand, had been completely blind to the fact that he was simply searching for the best possible mother for his children. A woman with a strong body and a submissive spirit. One who would accept his father’s whims and moods.

  Physically she was indeed a strong young woman. About the rest, he had been sorely mistaken.

  Not that he was the only one who had been mistaken. What she hadn’t realized at first was that Hentie and Andries Maritz came as a package. Marry the son and you inherited the father. At Liefenleed, the Maritzes’ farm on the far side of the Soutpansberg, they farmed together as the family had been doing for generations.

  All she saw at that stage was a big, strong, handsome farmer. One who had fought in the Border War for what he believed in. A real man’s man. A pure-bred Maritz.

  That first evening, and in the months that followed, she would never have guessed that this “real man” was his father’s lapdog. Just as she had never guessed there was a genetic explanation for the difference in appearance between herself and the rest of her family. If, of course, Tieneke wasn’t lying simply to get her to go to Ghent.

  Didn’t want you. The words had such a bleak sound.

  How could a mother put her child in the arms of another and walk away?

  Or did she leave her baby in a cradle and hit the road? A rubbish bin? On someone’s doorstep? Did she turn for one last look?

  Did she ever wonder about her daughter again? Remember birthdays? Think of her at Christmas? At her coming of age? Did she wonder about her daughter’s wedding day? Whether she had grandchildren? Even great-grandchildren were a possibility, Caz thought, though Lilah had never mentioned such plans.

  How could you leave a child and her entire progeny behind—blood of your blood?

  She would have to find answers to all these questions, Caz realized. Or she would lose her mind.

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. No, it just wasn’t possible. Tieneke had to be lying.

  Or did it explain everything? Tieneke’s aversion to her for as long as she could remember. Ma Fien ... No, apparently not her mother after all. Fien. Fien’s increasing aloofness until that moment when she finally chased Caz away. Her father’s lack of interest in any of his youngest daughter’s exploits. He had been kind, but not interested in his so-called late-born child.

  And Lilah, of course. It could explain Lilah.

  Two

  Tuesday, September 2

  Caz

  Overberg

  The sleep Caz managed to get was fraught with nightmares. Strangely enough she didn’t dream of Josefien or Tieneke. Not actually about Hentie either. Mainly about his father, though Hentie was there in the background—as had always been the case in the presence of his father.

  Why Tieneke’s shocking news had subconsciously reminded her of Andries Maritz, she couldn’t fathom. The dream had been so real that for the first time in years she remembered again how she had felt in her father-in-law’s proximity. Almost as if she were married to him, instead of his son.

  Caz stepped out on the veranda with her coffee mug, drawing the fresh Overberg air deep into her lungs. There was no wind yet, as was usual before ten in the morning at this time of year. The birds fossicked in the trees. Catya was sitting on the lawn, licking herself as she always did after a meal. A donkey brayed on a nearby smallholding and the neighbors’ dog barked in reply.

  Everything was exactly as it had been the day before. And yet so different.

  Why she had been so desperate to belong in those bygone days she could only ascribe to her feeling of inferiority and the naïveté of youth. It was that very need to belong that had blinded her to the obvious, though Hentie’s guile had added insult to injury.

  Hentie had been a coward, but no fool. Before the wedding he had made certain that Caz spent as little time as possible with Andries.

  Andries was even taller and bigger than his son and an attractive man for his age when she had first met him. For his age? Hello, he was only about forty-seven. Five years younger than her present age. But at the time she had seen him as a much older man.

  She’d suspected that with him it would be fit in or fuck off, but after he had given her the once-over, he had actually been quite friendly.

  “Good child-bearing hips,” he had apparently complimented Hentie with his choice that evening, though she would only find out about it later. After the wedding. Like so many things she would learn about and realize only after the wedding.

  Andries was a hardworking farmer. The three farms were big and lay far apart—the main one at the foot of the Soutpansberg, the second near Tshipise and the other one closer to Pafuri.

  Caz had had no reason to suspect that Hentie had bargained on her not coming into contact with his father too often during her visits. That was before the wedding. After the wedding it was a different matter. The Maritzes not only farmed together, they lived in the same house as well. She’d thought it would be temporary. It wasn’t, and was never meant to be.

  She got a foretaste of the implications of this arrangement shortly before the wedding.

  After a few canceled appointments, the Colijns were commandeered to the farm to meet and get to know their prospective in-laws. It was the day after a public holiday, the Day of the Covenant, and two weeks before the wedding, which had been set for New Year’s Eve.

  It was clear from the outset that the parents in the Colijn-Maritz alliance would not get along. Caz had suspected as much, and had delayed the meeting as long as possible. She had even deliberately sabotaged it during the ten months she and Hentie had been dating.

  It hadn’t been difficult. The bakery kept Hans busy and Josefien had no desire to meet a pair of backvelders from the wild north, whether her lastborn was set on marrying their son or not.

  Finally the meeting couldn’t be avoided any longer. Tieneke agreed to see to the bakery and Josefien could think of no further excuse not to meet her daughter’s future in-laws.

  It was a balls-up—even worse than Caz had feared.

  Josefien kept whining about the heat, the dust, the creepy crawlies, and made no effort to hide her disapproval. If she did try to conceal her disdain of the big farmer with the sonorous voice and fearless gaze who was to be her daughter’s father-in-law, she failed miserably.

  A sweating Hans, on the other hand, tried to impress Andries in his genial baker’s way, his apple cheeks bobbing up and down as he chuckled and chattered, running his hand over his ample girth. Andries, however, had no inclination to make small talk with a Dutchman who baked bread and made cakes for a living.

  After they had been officially introduced, Andries steered the first conversation toward politics, but Hans admitted he had no interest in the subject. When Andries talked about r
ugby, Hans shook his head again. Instead, he volunteered a story about a birthday cake he had once made in the shape of a “football.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to the wife about that,” Andries said bluntly when Hans wanted to explain the fine art of making choux pastries, for which he was renowned in Pretoria.

  Maybe things would have been better if Andries had been a wheat farmer and Hans at least a consumer of his product, but Andries farmed with cattle and game. On the Tshipise farm he had a field of tomatoes and some alfalfa for private use, but that was it. His cattle were his passion and his pride, and the game a small goldmine. Perhaps Fien should not have volunteered that the Colijns preferred pork and chicken to beef and venison.

  The next day Hans obliged by joining mother-in-law Magdel in the big kitchen. The two of them didn’t exactly hit it off. Magdel was too reserved. Or perhaps she had taken offence the night before when Fien had looked down her nose at Magdel’s cast-iron pots and declared that they couldn’t possibly be hygienic.

  Or perhaps Magdel didn’t take kindly to Hans’s lack of enthusiasm for her homemade bread. Or perhaps because Fien, not quite under her breath, had remarked to Hans, who was about to accept a second helping, that the food was too salty and greasy for his state of health.

  Andries Maritz was a bastard and a chauvinist pig, but one thing Caz could vouch for: his loyalty toward his wife and son was indisputable. He could berate and belittle them as much as he liked himself, but no one else dared make a disparaging remark about them.

  Magdel must have told Andries about the cast-iron cookware issue. Lord knows why. On the second night, as he lit his pipe after supper, Andries looked his son’s future mother-in-law in the eye.

  “Well, Josefien, it seems you’ve survived the unhygienic meals so far,” he said.

  Fien pursed her lips. “It’s just that we do it differently at home. And I do the cleaning myself. Here a maid cleans the pots.”

  “That may be so, Josefien, but Magdel is an excellent cook and she keeps an eye on her maids. You can eat from the floor, never mind the pot, that’s how clean it is. I’m telling you now, you will not insult my wife in her own kitchen. Is that clear?”