October

by Zoe Wicomb

  How very far you have traveled, Craig once said to her shortly after they met. She understood it as a tired trope and smiled, not knowing whether to be offended. There was no point in saying that traveling had brought very little, that apart from the civility achieved through money and self-regard the northern world seemed much the same—there was only the business of growing older and necessarily inching this way and that, scratching about like a hen in the straw for a place in which to be comfortable. That is the payoff, the compensation for the loss of youth, of beauty, which is so wasted on the young, who do not know that they are beautiful. As long as it has nothing to do with coming full circle like a salmon, with the horrible notion of roundness and completion. But then, expecting to be comfortable in your declining years, to shuffle into old age hand in hand with the beloved turns out to be asking too much, is a sign of complacency that has to be punished, and the punishment to be borne with dignity. Which is to say without crying.

  What, Mercia wonders, will happen to Sylvie? When all is done and dusted will Sylvie go quietly, launch herself into a new condition of single motherhood and ugly poverty? Or will she throw her head back and bray at the unjust world? Tear out Jake’s eyes?

  Nicky slumps in front of the television. His mother bustles about with a feather duster, muttering to herself, or rather ambiguously talking to herself as well as to Mercia, whom she does not address directly, and of whom she appears to expect no answers. Even the question of a camera, which Mercia is about to answer. Sylvie supposes that Mercia would have brought a camera, so why then has there been no sign of it? But she does not wait for a reply. Her strange discourse segues seamlessly to the child, to his deprivation, of how he’d be better off without having to know such a father, to Meester’s camera that has disappeared, no doubt sold by Jake for a bottle of plonk. A disgrace, and such a good camera that Pa had expressly said was for Nicky. Ag, to talk and talk about things, what does it help, Sylvie says self-reflexively; she admonishes herself to stop, that it does no good, and then she is indeed quiet for a while, before starting up once more. Mercia thinks that she could grow to like such interaction, where someone else’s loops of consciousness wash over you, making no demands on you to speak, where your presence is enough.

  As it happens, Mercia does have a camera, a brand-new Panasonic, which in a foolish moment at an airport she bought in the belief that she ought to have a hobby. She has brought it along, but does not even have the inclination to read the instructions. The ubiquity of cameras, the deferral of looking and experiencing as people snap instead, preferring the image, the chosen angle to savor at another time, has always been distasteful to her. The truth is that she is too embarrassed to carry the thing about. She ought to say to Sylvie that the boy could have hers. Why doesn’t she?

  Christ, the woman will sit there in the doorway soaking up sunlight and say nothing, stare like an idiot into space. As if there were no one else about, as if she, Sylvie, the one who dusts and sweeps and stirs the pots, were not there. That’s what these grand people are like, the Murrays and their kind. If that’s what education brings then thank you very much, she would happily do without abc-ing. She too could sit around with books, magazines, but what a waste of time that would be, getting yourself all het up like a teenager about people you don’t know, dressed-up people who have nothing to do with you. No more than a kind of busybodiness that passes for being clever.

  And why has Mercia said nothing about the camera? Sylvie’s days of photographing herself are over; she would rather not think of that time; she doesn’t know what happened to that old camera. Did she not give it to Kytou? But it’s different for the child. Nicky, who knows no better, bless his heart, had gone through his auntie’s bag, had brought out the camera to show his mother, and of course he has to learn that one does not look into other people’s things, so she had to give him a good smack. Especially a cheeky child like Nicky, who said that he found the camera in his room, so why couldn’t he look?

  It is just as well that Nicky is there. A child is a handy thing for breaking the ice, so she says to Mercia, who starts—just as she thought, as if no one else is about—that the child tore his trousers yesterday. She wonders aloud whether Mercia is any good at needlework, at invisible mending. That might just give the woman a much-needed something to do, something practical.

  For a moment Mercia recoils at the idea. Mending, darning, letting out the dreaded hems—that she could not countenance, but almost at the same time she revises the thought. Why not? Why not do something with her hands, besides, will it not sound snooty to say that she can’t?

  I didn’t do needlework at school, and my mother got nowhere in her attempts to teach me, she explains. But you know what it’s like when you grow up; you want clothes, fashionable things. When there isn’t the money and you wouldn’t dare to ask anyway, you’ve got to get round it. So I tried to teach myself; I learned to knit and also to sew, but really I wasn’t much good at needlework. I’ll give it a go, but don’t hold your breath.

  Sylvie tosses the child’s trousers to her. She doesn’t buy that stuff about being poor. She remembers Mercia, an older, distant figure, always looking nice, and wearing good shoes. What nonsense, the Murrays had plenty, although the old man was according to Jake mean, and Sylvie knows exactly what he means.

  Mercia examines the damage. The trousers are worn; the ripped fabric has frayed, so that sewing a new seam would not be strong enough. Anyway, there’s no such thing as invisible mending. She says that if there’s an old pair that he’s outgrown, she could use the material to patch this one. She understands Sylvie’s frown. Faux-poor is the prerogative of the wealthy. The woman cannot but fear that her child will be laughed at, so Mercia explains that patches these days are okay, ripped trousers twice as cool and not at all a sign of poverty.

  Sylvie’s voice is adamant; she won’t have her boy go about in rags. It will have to be your fancy patches then, even if it makes no sense that people should want to pretend to be poor. Imagine ripping perfectly good trousers to look cool. She knows that Mercia is making it up, no doubt trying to get out of doing the job, but she finds fabric for the patch. Perhaps, she laughs triumphantly, you could fix your brother’s trousers as well. He’s turning into a right skollie, staggering about to the bar with his clothes all ripped, making people say how she is a bad wife when there is no need for him to wear torn things. No need at all, given that she does everything, has the washed and pressed clothes hanging up neatly in the cupboard, but no, he must get the kekkelbekke in the village talking. There are plenty of those, just jealous that she has married a Murray, and now ready to gossip about the slightest thing.

  Well, if people once were jealous they will no longer be, Mercia says. It clearly is not such a wonderful thing to be married to a man who’s a millstone round Sylvie’s neck if ever she saw one—even if he is lying in his bed. But Jake will have to pull himself together, get out of that bed, otherwise she, Mercia, will drag him out herself. Sylvie snorts, easier said than done. It’s time to get the dinner, she sighs. A piece of fish would make a nice change, the fish that Mercia said she would get. But Mercia, immersed in a tricky chapter that morning, had clean forgotten. She is so sorry; she’ll go right away; there is still time.

  Forgotten to get the dinner? Sylvie says nothing but looks at her with incredulity. How can anyone, a woman, forget such a thing? Did that Scotsman of hers, that Craig, did he not expect better of her? No wonder the man left.

  Mutual friends were careful not to invite Craig and Mercia to the same events. People were kind. Mostly Mercia, the one in need of kindness, would be consulted first, and she declined all but the most irresistible invitations. She knew that Smithy and others would also have to get used to the new couple, Craig and the woman whose name she could not utter. Soon, of course, a baby would keep them indoors whilst she, Mercia, would go about unencumbered. Pathetic, and though she thinks herself above it, it is the case that she braces herself for being viewed as
one who has missed the boat, as people once said, one in need of kindness.

  Nonsense, Smithy said, your heart will mend, and then you won’t care. Then you’ll see how people will envy you for coming and going as you please, happy as a lark. But that made embarrassing tears stream down Mercia’s newly lined face. I’ll be fine, she said, as long as I don’t walk into them, or even into Craig.

  Inevitably, she did. One Saturday morning early at the Fish Plaice, where mercifully Craig was on his own, and Scott the fishmonger, believing them still to be together, shouted his usual banter of No need for Viagra, fish’ll do the trick. Yous having a party? Half price for three kilo, can’t say fairer than that, pal. And his mother laughed, Yous should be so lucky.

  Under his breath Craig said, Has Fiona told you? It was an accident. We didn’t—

  But Mercia interrupted with a terse Congratulations, and left without the salmon that Scott was filleting for her.

  Mercia returns her cursor to a new page in the Home file. No harm, she thinks, in larking about, but the words about the self, so bound up with Craig, elude her. She would have to resort to the corny creative writing exercise: a day in the life of a penny, or an oak leaf in autumn, or a salmon . . .

  who has crossed the boundaries from fresh to salt water, from river to sea, from sea to river, my scales glittering with guanine crystals, my kidneys primed with Italian wine, my skin bleached by sunless skies, I am the one flailing in the shallows, the one who has not managed the leap.

  This she deletes and replaces with: the one who has declined the leap.

  She ought to delete the lot.

  This is also the story of Nicholas Murray, and the crucial role of bootstraps in the making of him. It is the story he did not tire of telling, one that marked him as outsider midst these idle Namaqualanders who toast themselves in the winter sun without a care in the world.

  When Nicholas left his home in the Klein Karoo, it was not that he did not heed the fifth commandment—Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Rather, as he explained to his pa, one cannot make anything of life as a plowboy. Granted, these commandments were given to Moses on tablets of stone, but if you thought about it, thought about the fact that Moses had led his people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, then Pa would see that God intended for people to move on and to free themselves from oppression.

  His pa, who believed that the earth should be tilled by those born to it, was not convinced. Besides, it was vainglorious of the boy to think of himself as Moses, and as for the argument that the earth he cultivated did not even belong to him, well, the earth belonged to none other than God. It was his ma who coaxed, who arranged for Nicholas a place to stay in the dorp where he worked by day as a messenger boy and went to school by night. He had given himself only six years, Nicholas boasted, in which to put himself through Matric and teachers’ training college, and to take home to Pa a pay packet of crackling paper money.

  Kliprand was Nicholas’s first post. When he arrived—a young man—in the summer of 1955, he could not have guessed that he would spend the rest of his life in that place. Being from another part, from the Overberg district, a land more lush, where a vegetable garden could flourish and where cattle grazed contentedly, he believed that Kliprand was not a place for staying.

  The advertisement in the Government Gazette spoke of a primary school in a remote settlement where he knew he would not be answerable to anyone. That was the kind of freedom he strived for—Nicholas would not be watched and bossed about by white people. Although he would have to teach all the classes in one room, the numbers were manageable, and since the heuristic approach was in any case the best education, his strategy was for the older children to learn their lessons and practice their English by instructing and testing the younger ones. Even the little ones, sitting in a circle in the shade, took turns at being teacher.

  Only rarely did an inspector turn up to check on meester, and not only were his books and registers in order, but the children, more or less clean, chanted their times tables enthusiastically, sang “Uit die blou van onse hemel,” identified the Tropics on the battered old globe, knew the history of the country by rote, and could recite rhymes in English. The inspector knew nothing about meester’s after-school activities, the garden where children learned their natural sciences from the mealies, pumpkins, and watermelons he conjured out of the dry land. And from the goats and sheep that multiplied and soon constituted a sizeable flock. The people shook their heads in surprise and admiration: Ai Goetsega, that meester was now a first-class kind of a man.

  That was what the people of Kliprand called him—Meester, but it was also his status as stranger that earned respect amongst the Namaquas, for strangers must be honored. He was an outsider and so necessarily better, a man who would teach their children, give help and advice with ailments, read and write their letters, and deal on their behalf with white authorities. When dominee was ill, they could rely on him to step in at a moment’s notice to deliver a stirring sermon. Meester was in charge of the new drug against tuberculosis, left in his custody by Dr. Groenewald, who was not always inclined to travel to the township and so relied on him to administer the weekly injections. He also purchased from Dr. Groenewald a supply of anti-inflammatory tablets, the new drug which would rescue the sick from the very clutches of death.

  Yislaaik, the women exclaimed with pride, this Meester was both teacher and doctor; he could do the needle as well as the pen. And when a minor problem arose for any family, they could rely on him for food, or to help out with a loan. These functions set him apart as a stranger, better off than themselves. Meester was a good man, and a good man was hard to find.

  Nicholas was not going to scrape a living as a schoolmaster. The bootstraps by which he had pulled himself out of the world of goat-herders and plowboys, where three of his brothers remained, would lever him above the meager living of a village schoolmaster. He would also keep livestock and sell his own produce. His children would go to school and to university in the city. Nicholas was fortunate in meeting the lovely, God-fearing Antoinette Malherbe, demure in dress and demeanor, and raised in the respectable mission station of Elim. She was just modern enough to stop at two children. Boy and girl, that would do, one of each, she promised, although he would have preferred the boy to be the elder. Nicholas could not help feeling that not being the older contributed to Jake’s fecklessness. A boy who is an ouboet would not shirk responsibility, but being the younger, the baby as Antoinette persisted in calling him, Jake had somehow been spoilt.

  After all these years, was the place where he had been raised, the small holding in the Overberg valley where his family lived from hand to mouth, still home for Nicholas? Could that be home when he had not been there for so long, remembered little more than the youthful urge to leave the place? These were questions that plagued him once the children scampered about the stony wastes of Kliprand.

  No, Nicholas came to love this land where he had done so well, and where he planned to stay until his dying day. He was nothing but loyal to Kliprand, his place of domicile, but saw no need to abandon his position as outsider. Here, in this remote outpost of Namaqualanders, he could not very well belong. Nomad blood seemed still to course in their veins, for why did they not till the land? Why were they content to toil for low-class Englishmen in the gypsum mines?

  How he hated their speech. The dragged vowels and especially the use of ga and hitse, surely Hottentot words, he considered barbaric. How could knowledge be acquired in such a tongue? These people were too—and he appeared to search for the word each time—well, too indigenous, refusing to wash away the stamp of Hottentot origins. In fact, did they not use the excuse of brack water for not washing as often as they should?

  Here in Kliprand a few of the old people sang, of all things, hymns in a savage tongue that Jesus surely could not condone, and the young men smoked local dagga and danced the kabarra, a word
pronounced with a clicking tongue that Nicholas knew he would never manage. Flushed with shame, he watched the askoek dance, as some preferred to call it. A dusty affair, performed where the fire had died down after the grilling of flatbread, by men leaping high off the ground as they clicked the sides of their feet together, ash flying. His role as Meester was clear. The hotnos ways, the memory of clicks and kabarra and ash, had to be beaten out of the children. To this purpose he lined them up in military fashion, got them to march stiffly in time to his bellow of links-regs, left-right, up and down the dusty rugby field, starting the day with exercises that required straightened limbs and heads held high. Only thereafter the recitation of the alphabet, of times tables and unfathomable poems committed to memory, and the children were soundly thrashed for faltering.

  Thus if Nicholas, as his father had taught him, was at one with the land, knowledgeable about its flora and fauna, knew its every undulation, its mounds and troughs, every outcrop of rock, the sparse shrubs, the memory of winter streams in the washed earth—there was nothing dramatic about this landscape—he was not of the place. Yes, he tilled the earth, but holding on to his bootstraps, he also cultivated a necessary distance, an unbelonging. By such means the distant memory of European blood could be kept alive.

  The Murrays were of old Scottish stock, people who had settled before the Europeans were corrupted by Africa. A good old colored family, evenly mixed, who having attained genetic stability could rely on good hair and healthy dark skin, not pitch-black like Africans, and certainly nothing like sly Slamse from the east, who were not to be trusted. The Murrays had no further use for European blood, no need for more mixing; they were proud colored people who kept their distance from others. Nicholas shook his head contemptuously at the people of Kliprand who did not mind at all if one of their girls arrived from the white dorp with a blue-eyed baby, the product of cheap relations with a master.