October Page 2

  Nicholas was not a vain man. He wore a goatee and a moustache that marked his respectability. For some time it had been white with age, in other words, what is known as distinguished in a man. Thus he did not long for the days of youth when he courted the beautiful Antoinette with his raven-black hair; rather, it was the sprinkling of salt and pepper of his forties, when poor Nettie had already departed, that brought a tug of nostalgia. Youth, he knew, was overrated. Being hotheaded and impetuous, a young man could not know where he stands, or indeed at times how to stand, his hands darting in and out of pockets searching for a comfortable place.

  How well Nicholas remembered his youthful arms dangling awkwardly, or how shifting his weight from one hip to another brought no end to uncertainty. Then, neither Klaas nor baas, it was a matter of tottering and stumbling on shifting sands. No, it was in the middle years of salt-and-pepper respectability, when Nicholas stood firmly on the rock and uttered his words with precision, that he knew who he was. That, he thought, was also when a man was most attractive to women, for he could not fail to note their interest. Not that he’d had much to do with women. With the help of God, Nicholas had found a wife whose price was above rubies, a good woman who produced two healthy children, but who died all too early at the age of thirty-nine. Yes, he had been tested by God, but that premature death had not encouraged desire for another marriage. He was perfectly capable of boiling an egg himself, of raising his two children, and the good people of Kliprand helped out from time to time, for Meester was a good man.

  Nicholas believed that there was a handsome solidity, as well as virtue, to be found in a disciplined man given to gravity and kindness, but irrevocably single. So people said that Meester was a good man and that a good man, as everyone knows, is hard to find. Which for some with a literary bent might signal a well-deserved murder, although it would be foolish to expect a match between life and art.

  It is not the case that Mercia neglects her duties. She works as hard as ever on lectures, tutorials and supervisions. Given who she is, she expects no allowance for slack, but it is the case that her research project on postcolonial memory is slowly being supplanted by the memoir. Mercia reassures herself that the funded work is well ahead of target, that for once she ought to let go since the personal writing gets her through the pain; it won’t be long before she is back on track. She must make allowances for herself—it is not so surprising that her habits are being amended. For instance, if academic life has left little time or inclination for contemporary fiction, a recent review has persuaded Mercia, titillated by the title, to order the prize-winning novel Home.

  The book arrived at the same time as Jake’s letter. News from home was always disturbing, making any kind of work impossible, thus she started reading the novel, partly to put off reading the letter and thinking about Jake, darling Jake, her no-longer-little brother. As it turns out, Mercia is consumed by the novel. All evening, she reads, until late that night, barely stopping to eat a hurried supper. In the morning, a glance in the mirror confirms that she looks awful, unwashed and haggard, much like the fabled writer she once would have liked to be, stumbling out of an attic, disheveled and blinking in the northern light.

  Mercia may not be as good as the glorious sister in the novel, but the correspondences are there, including the ironic depiction of home. Strangely familiar, this story of siblings, brother and sister, that turns out also to be one of father and son. But theirs—Mercia and Jake’s story—is from a different continent, a different hemisphere, a different kind of people, a kind so lacking in what is known as western gentility. Theirs is a harsh land that makes its own demands on civility. Their father too, a good man, even if he does not know how to show his love for an errant son. By the time she gets to the end of the novel she has doubts about her own memoir. Is hers not redundant for the telling?

  Mercia, an English teacher, an academic, necessarily thinks of texts and their families, thus she will suffer with the anxiety of influence, but more importantly, she no longer feels like carrying on with her story. There is, as she has always suspected, in the face of fiction and its possibilities, no point in telling the true tale; besides, she can’t vouch for the truth, since already there is more invention than memoir. For her story is also Jake’s, and has she not always, or in some ways, avoided Jake’s story, avoided being caught up between him and their father?

  Jake’s letter, still unopened, landed in her house as a caution against writing, against the presumption of knowing (it is as if she can hear his voice)—and from such a distance too. There is also the small matter of the research for which she has been awarded a sabbatical, and which will not brook delay whilst she messes about with memoir. She does not delete the morning’s work as she promised herself; instead the file, Home, is saved and closed. Will she open it again? Mercia thinks not. An aberration, that’s what it is, another ready-made response to being left. She ought to have known from the uncanny flow of words. For heaven’s sake, she has after all no interest in this genre that floods the markets, or supermarkets, these days. All the same, she does not delete the file.

  Now, whilst there is still the business of adjusting to being alone, unloved, Jake’s please-come-home letter has arrived. He has never written before, never replied to her occasional, dutiful accounts of her life in Glasgow. There are neither recriminations nor a reminder of her rash promise at their father’s funeral to return, just the brief note, a single page on which is hurriedly scrawled, without salutation: Come home Mercy. Then plaintively, You haven’t been home for ages. There is a gap, as if time has passed and he has deliberated over the next line: The child (yes, that was how he referred to his son) needs you. Please come and get the child. You are all he has left. It is signed Jacques, which she has never called him.

  Mercia knows of course about the boy, Nicky, who at the time of the funeral had been packed off to his granny. She thought it strange, but it was so much easier not to ask questions. Strange too that she has not been shown any photographs; she cannot remember how old Nicky is, has no idea what he looks like, does not understand how he could possibly need her, but then people seldom say what they mean. Mercia knows Jake’s letter to be histrionic nonsense. Has he returned to drinking? If there really were a problem, an emergency, he would have called. Nevertheless, she may have to heed his request and go home, or rather, visit. Maybe that is the place where she might stop crying—at home, a place where a heart could heal.

  The thought of the Cape as home brings an ambiguous shiver—the small town in Klein Namaqualand, Kliprand. Hardly more than a village. How could anyone want to live there? Why would anyone stay there? These are questions that Mercia too must ask, although in those parts the words live and stay are interchangeable. South Africans, having inherited the language from the Scots, speak of staying in a place when they mean living there. Which is to say that natives are not expected to move away from what is called home. Except, of course, in the case of the old apartheid policy for Africans, the natives who were given citizenship of new Homelands where they were to live. But they were required after all to work and therefore to stay in the white cities from which they had been ejected. Come stay with me and be my slave . . .

  In Glasgow Mercia insists on the distinction between living and staying; she is only there temporarily; it cannot be her home. She visits Kliprand often, but knows at the same time that to stay there would allow the soul to die rather than to live. Which is how Mercia and Jake had always thought of the place, although they would have balked at the word soul. The soul of black folk? Or rather, Jake corrected her on an earlier visit—colored folk like them who once adopted soul; nowadays it is better to come clean as colored, he laughed. Typically, he would not expand, could never allow himself to see a thought through, so she exclaimed provocatively, Mayibuye Africa!

  Bu-ullshit, he said, turning bull into two syllables.

  Nicholas, now dead for several months, had never made a distinction between living and staying. A son of
the soil, he called himself, without irony, which was to say a good person. To stay put was virtuous; to stay there was to be alive. Like the great old thorn tree that he planted on his arrival at the gate of the dip-kraal, now rooted in the history of the place, he lived and naturally, necessarily, stayed.

  Mercia thinks of her father as still being there. Like the thorn tree. Stricken with guilt, she had come for the five days it took to manage the funeral that Jake and his wife seemed incapable of doing.

  I know, her father used to say at the end of each of her visits, I know in my heart that you’ll come back home one day.

  Yes, she agreed at first, as soon as this monstrous government is overthrown. After the end of apartheid she had nothing to say, would smile sheepishly at him.

  Home to stay!—the opening words of the father in the novel, which strikes a chill in the fictional daughter’s heart, as it does Mercia’s. The chill is laced with guilt. Oh, if only she had spent some time with him before he died.

  Bu-ullshit, Jake said, the old bastard was well past his sell-by date.

  Ag, Jake, don’t be so disrespectful, so unkind, she pleaded.

  Respect! he snorted. I’ve never forgiven him for the beatings. And neither should you.

  Was it grief that made Jake speak so cruelly? She was his sister, the one he loved, so why did he seem intent on hurting her? And why did Jake not want her to stay at his house? She saw his wife Sylvie only briefly at the funeral, had not seen the child at all. But Jake shook his head, stared vacantly.

  Man, he said, you won’t like our way of doing things. Just count yourself lucky that you don’t stay here, in this mess.

  Mercia assumed that he was speaking of the state of the country, of the disappointing aspects of the New South Africa. Perhaps you have unreasonable expectations, she said, given how much of the old South Africa is still in place. But Jake would not be drawn.

  I’ll be back soon, she said rashly. I’ll come home for the summer, the winter I mean, so just you get yourselves ready.

  There was something unspeakably forlorn about Jake. For all his callous talk about their father, he seemed more distressed than he would admit. Jake needed her, but then, Jake had always needed her, Mercia thought guiltily.

  Whatever, he said.

  So, fashionable expressions nowadays spread even to unlikely places like Kliprand, a place she thinks of as the bundus or whatever the contemporary word for such places might be. At least Jake did not say Bu-ullshit. Which she hated.

  For Mercia there could be no return to the pays natal where the same old dabikwa trees lean to the west and ghanna bush turns gray and crumbles in midsummer. Jake too had gone to Cape Town for good, except that he succumbed to drink. Mercia wept as her father told of how he had become a drunken vagrant, found in the Cape Town docks sleeping rough, and racked with pneumonia. Nicholas had fitted the back of the bakkie with foam and an old traveling rug, and fetched Jake from the gutters of the city; he nursed him back to health in the room that the children once shared. Then Mercia wept on Craig’s shoulder, stricken with guilt for not being there for him, her baby brother, abandoned to the city’s cold wet winter. But their father said that Jacques had only himself to blame, that Mercia should not spill any tears over a good-for-nothing. As for the rug, he was sad that after all those years it had fallen apart, a thing to be thrown away. Their mother, Nettie, had bought it when the children were infants, and he did not like throwing Nettie’s things out, but, he tutted, it was soiled after the journey. A disgrace.

  Mercia has never minded Jake being Nettie’s favorite. She struggles to summon a memory of their mother, but a flash of blue striped fabric is all she can muster. That, and yes, a cake for Jake’s birthdays, dried fruit and the smell of clove and cinnamon and nutmeg rising from the oven. Is it an actual memory? her own? Or is the smell entwined with that in the novel she is reading, where the house is filled by the mother with fragrant food? Mercia recollects the message of that fragrance: this house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. She shakes her head. Again, the soul! She ought to have known the memory to be false. It is just as well, if she can’t distinguish between her own history and someone else’s fiction, that she has abandoned the memoir.

  With a sabbatical awarded for the autumn semester, Mercia cannot leave for the Cape right away. There are a number of administrative duties to fulfill over the summer, the re-sit examinations to manage, and her monograph has to be advanced in order to finish it by the end of the leave period. Much as she hates not going away over the summer, there is only just enough time to catch her breath. The memoir has been a foolish distraction.

  In the past Mercia has rushed off to escape the disappointing weather. Now the gardens in Glasgow compensate for staying put. With the enduring summer light comes wave after wave of bold efflorescence, which anyone would prefer to drought-stricken Namaqualand. Mercia watches over the fading of glorious forget-me-not, the powdery fragrance of lilac, species after species of flowering rhododendron, and the trellises spangled like so many stars with clematis. She awaits the explosion of flamered poppies, the roses that will stay in bloom until the autumn. That is when she ought to be away, in the month of October, when the sadness of retreating light strikes.

  At home, in the Southern Hemisphere, with the sun well on its way to the equator it will be warm, at least during the day. How effortlessly the word comes: home, the place she has not lived in for more than twenty-six years. Hot, oppressive, and heavy with the memories of growing up under the eagle eye of the old man, Our Father, Old Who-art-in-heaven, as the seven-year-old Jake mocked irreverently, but whispered all the same. Home, no more than a word, its meaning hollowed out by the termites of time, a shell carrying only a dull ache for the substance of the past. But living in another country, in a crazy era, Mercia is not yet ready for its collapse.

  How the Old Ones would have danced around the strange word, home, poured into it their yearning for a break from the mud and wattle and hide shelters of hunter-gatherers who followed their herds, who muttered under the breath their supplications to the moon, who relied on the seasons to assuage the restlessness of the soul by moving on. Even before the word, there would surely have been old women who sucked their gums in despair and dreamt of living as staying, dreamt of seeds taking root in the earth, growing into ripeness, even as a headman announced the decision to decamp. If nowadays ambition cannot accommodate the old notion of home, there has surely always been ambivalence, the impatience for something new, for moving on, across the world, whilst at the same time, at times, feeling the centripetal tug of the earth.

  Always in the period before going home, Mercia finds her nose twitching to various smells: onions sizzling in a pan, a patch of dug earth, or infuriatingly, something she cannot identify that nevertheless transports her to the Cape. From which she chooses to infer that the world is much the same all over, that we necessarily rely on nostalgia, the trace that connects us to the past. If the novel that Mercia is immersed in speaks of the soul finding its own home if it ever has a home at all, she must add that in places like Kliprand, where the idea of home is overvalued, laden with sentimentality, the soul produces its own straitjacket. Then she swallows, once, twice, to relieve the lump in her throat.

  When Mercia and Craig decided to buy a house together, she wrote to her father in carefully chosen words: I am throwing in my lot with a Scotsman, hitching up with a man called Craig McMillan.

  Nicholas, who naturally read that as marriage, took what was for him the unusual step of telephoning. Were there any problems with this man, Craig? he finally asked. Does he have children? Is he divorced? And Mercia, having said no, prised out of him the problem, the question he could not quite bring himself to ask: Why has Craig not managed to get a woman of his own kind? What was wrong with him?

  Mercia, not having the will to deal with such self-hatred, resorted to humor.

  Nothing much wrong with Craig, she assured him, it’s just that he has only one leg and on
e eye, and it so happens that Scottish women are mortally afraid of men who do not have thumbs.

  Her father said he was sorry, but he would not manage the trip overseas to give her away. He hoped that Jake would do. Jake, he assured her, was quite respectable these days.

  Mercia refrained from saying that she was not for the giving. Instead, she wrote, no, no need for Jake to come, that neither she nor Craig was keen on weddings, an ostentatious waste of money, leaving him to infer that it would be a simple registry office marriage. She dropped the flimsy blue aerogram hurriedly into the post box, suppressing guilt. She had not actually told a lie, had merely nudged him into believing that they were to marry. And really, there was nothing to be gained from hurting him with the truth—that she had no interest in marriage. The absence of a ring would be easily explained. She had never worn rings, chose not to draw attention to her ugly hands. As it turned out, Nicholas was still anxious.

  It was good, he said hesitantly on her next visit home, that she had chosen a man from Europe, but he hoped that she would be careful, vigilant against anything shameful.

  What on earth did he mean?

  We-ell, he said, people say that European men, at least here in South Africa, are disrespectful, that they hate themselves for going with nonwhite women. He hesitated before adding, and that’s why they beat their wives, for separating them from their families and their country. So Nicholas could only hope and pray . . .