Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Arthur approached the rondavel, his skin cooling, the cotton of his shirt sticking to his flesh. His breath was coming back under control, drawing back into him, but his heart kept up its wild beating, banging out its pulse within his ribs which felt fragile against its rhythm. The group outside parted in silence to let him through. There was no greeting. Nothing needed to be said. He felt sick with fatigue and thirst, and there was an irritation of doubt working at his mind. Should he have abandoned the service, left earlier? Had he arrived sooner might he have been able to help this boy lying on the floor of the hut, his cheeks hollow with the thumbprint of fever? No, he didn’t think so. A few hours would have been of little consequence, the fever had too strong a hold already. There were others that would be helped. Not that this mattered to the boy’s mother, who knelt over him now, holding his head in her hands, her fingernails digging into the skin of his skull as she rocked back and forth, her eyes screwed shut but with tears still finding their way through as she cried out, ‘ Tovigwa naniko? Tovigwa naniko? ’ Arthur went no nearer the boy, staying where he was, unwilling to break her flow of grief. So he stood there, stooped in the doorway of the rondavel, light-headed with exhaustion, his skin prickling in his sweat-drenched clothes, listening to the mother’s repeated question. ‘ Tovigwa naniko? ’ she asked the night. ‘Who will bury us?’

That night the sky listened, and the rains came, so in the morning they were able to bury the boy in newly wet earth, with the scent of new rain and honeysuckle in the air. Both of these smells reminded Arthur vividly of England, and particularly his boyhood in Kent, when the smell of rain on the dry, hot gravel of the driveway would entice him outside to play. These sudden memories of England were still frequent, ambushing him with no warning, arriving in an instant of recognition before falling through with a pang of homesickness in his chest. They disturbed him, these sudden memories. He had left England. There was nothing there for him anymore.

Despite the night’s rain the men of the village still had to start early to dig the grave. The ground under the wet layer of topsoil was hard and stubborn, and did not give easily to their tools. They worked in pairs, outside the periphery of the village, cutting, digging and sweating, the growing heat like a slow-pressing palm on their backs. Arthur watched them work. The boy’s father was a Christian, and had asked him to perform the burial service, and he had agreed, although he knew that others in the village would want to fulfil the traditional Shona customs of the dead as well. From his experience this was only to be expected, and he didn’t mind. He watched the men finish digging the grave then gather together at its side. A woman came out from the village, naked but for a skin about her waist and a delicate black tattoo across her stomach. She carried a clay pot and a longhandled cup, which she handed to the man who had started the grave now gaping from the red earth before them. The man, who was young, not much older than the boy who had died, took the swollen-bellied cup by its long handle and dipped it into the pot, which was filled with beer, brewed from rapoko . He lifted the cup and began pouring the dark, pungent liquid over his legs and arms. The others waited patiently. The beer would protect him from the misfortunes he might suffer from burying the boy, from the scent of the grave. The scent of death. It ran over his body sluggishly, drawing itself out in long trails which snaked down his legs, over the bulge of his calf and down to the ground where it was absorbed by the soil. When he had finished he handed the cup to the next man who did the same.

Arthur watched them in silence, from a distance. They tolerated his eyes as they tolerated his presence. It was these traditional beliefs that wouldn’t be submerged beneath Christian ritual, and again he didn’t mind. Some of these ceremonies had already taken on a significance for himself, and if anythmg he felt they made him and his God a more acceptable intrusion. Part of the landscape. A new chapter in the myth of the country.

When the cup had been passed around full circle, and all the men had dowsed their limbs in beer, Arthur turned and began to walk back towards the village, its rondavels clustered together beneath the granite-strewn kopje. He walked to the one where he had stayed the night, a kitchen hut, its uneven shelves moulded from the wall and polished to a black that managed to gleam in the darkness. Here he put on his cassock and fastened the stiff dog collar about his neck before picking up his Shona prayer book, kneeling onto the hard floor and preparing himself for his own rituals for burying the dead.

He gave the service and last rites in Shona. He wasn’t yet fluent in the language but had learnt enough to perform his duties, memorising the necessary passages. The language fitted him well, he enjoyed the sensation of its vowels and sounds on his tongue. The alien intonation gave the words A music he had never found before, freeing them from immediate meaning, lending a rhythm and a metre he had failed to achieve with the broken syllables of English. As he spoke the sun rose behind the grey clouds, and the heat grew, expanded around them, closing them in a humid grip. The boy, who could have been any age between fifteen and twenty-five, the fever having drained him of his true appearance, had been lain out with care, his thin arms folded across his chest, and his body wrapped in pieces of white cloth. His skin had been oiled with groundnut oil, his hair washed with wild apple juice and his eyes cleaned. His mother stood beside the body, quiet and unmoving, her grief wrung from her throughout the night, leaving her hollow with mourning.

Arthur listened to the sound of his own voice shrink into the veld air and watched the shifting bare feet of the little crowd around the grave. When he finished he stood back to let the body be lifted into the newly dug hole, where the boy’s ritual friend, the sahwira , was waiting to receive it. But then he saw something was missing. The blanket. The blanket beneath the deceased’s head. There wasn’t one. Dropping his prayer book, he slipped his cassock over his head and began folding it into a neat bundle. As the heavy cloth slipped off him he felt a welcome rush of cool air against his skin, an escape of trapped heat. Kneeling to the ground, he placed the improvised blanket under the boy’s head, gently lifting him with his hand around the base of his skull, then lowering him again onto the white cloth. His head felt fragile, hollow, the bone beneath the skin as thin as a bird’s egg. The people remained quiet, and the boy’s mother looked straight ahead, out towards the mountains in the east. How many children had she lost in this way? How many more would she lose? No one could tell her, least of all him. He felt useless. He stood again and stepped back from the body. The men closed in and lowered it into the grave. Arthur looked at the mother. She was still, her face set, one tear that had outgrown the lip of her eyelid settling on her cheek instead.

The sky listened again, and as the sahwira arranged a few paltry belongings around the body — a cup, a catapult and a carved wooden necklace — and the boy’s father and cousins scattered the first handfuls of soil into the grave, the rain began once more. Large drops, that hit the ground heavily, leaving wet dents in the earth and turning the red dust dark. Arthur watched as the men began to shovel the earth back over the body, the loose soil filling in the shape of the boy: the crease between his upper arm and his torso, the shallow basket of his crossed arms, the spaces between his toes, the sunken sockets of his eyes. Soon there was no boy, just a pregnant swelling of disturbed soil, and eventually Arthur turned away, finding it hard to breathe under the restriction of his collar. As he walked back towards the rondavels and smoking fires of the village the last spadefuls of earth padded into the grave behind him, following him like footsteps.