Zoe Wicomb - October

He loves me yeah, yeah, yeah, Jake intoned slowly, solemnly, parodying the old man, old Who-art-in-heaven. He said the old man was pure evil. Even God could not have been as petty as their father. If that was what paternal love was, please could he be an unloved, abandoned orphan? The very word, love, made him want to reach for a knobkierie; he would club to death anyone who claimed to love him.

Jake did not despise their mother for her silent complicity, for agreeing with the old man. Yes, Nettie knew how unreasonable the old man’s rules were, but he believed her hands to be tied, that she too was subject to Nicholas’s wrath.

Jake’s revenge came in his first year at university, some years after Nettie’s death. I don’t think, he said languidly — stretching rudely at the breakfast table, savoring the effect and calculating the hurt — nah, I don’t think I’ll be bothering with the kak of exams this year.

Nicholas frowned, cleared his throat; he surely hadn’t heard correctly. What was that? Ignoring the rude word, he asked, Do you mean you’d like to go back to bed like a lazy hotnot and sleep till midday, rather than do your duty?

Precisely, Jake retorted, glad you understand that this is it. I’m finished with university.

He pushed back his plate of mealie porridge and leaned back, tilting his chair. Jake was proud of his defiance. He laughed uproariously when the old man said that he was not too old for a hiding.

Jake could no longer bear to be dependent on their father. I don’t want the vark’s money, he explained to Mercia, and university loans are only for those who become teachers. Can’t face that, so I’m off. Plenty of jobs in the liquor trade, and it suits me fine that the vark’s disappointment is such that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Serves him right for ramming down my throat that he’d sacrificed himself for us. All those pathetic tales of a snot-nosed barefoot child with no schooling, pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, dragging himself through night school, the scrimping and scraping by and going without in order to fulfill his promise to Mummy that we’ll go to university — I’ve had enough of that.

Boring an index finger into his right temple, Jake mimed their father’s madness. Old Who-art-in-heaven’s off his head hey, stupid, thinking that if you shout the word gratitude long and hard enough at children that’s precisely what they’ll feel. What kind of gratitude is that that has to be implanted by the giver? Mercy, you too should leave, he urged, get out of his bullying grasp.

But I’m at the end of my honors year, she said. It wouldn’t make sense.

Oh no, he mocked, the old boy will have an idiom for it. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, he intoned. No man, Mercia, he said, shaking his head. It’s a matter of principle. Besides, the price for this grand education is eternal obedience. No thanks, he can stuff it up his arse. Jake spat a spectacular far-reaching arc of spittle through his front teeth. Look where obedience has got him. A bloody apartheid collaborator. I’m surprised he’s not stood for the tricameral colored parliament.

Grateful that her exams were no longer the topic, Mercia said that it wasn’t fair. Yes, the old man was flawed, but he was their father, and who was without flaws? He belonged to another generation, and the truth was that she did feel grateful to him for living a life of frugality and penny-pinching in order to pay for their education. And Jake’s assessment of his politics was unfair. He was not a revolutionary, it was true; he kept his head down, keeping out of the way of what he saw as trouble, but he had taught them self-respect, never to capitulate to whiteness.

Oh yes, Jake snarled, self-preservation all right. And what about Africans? Did he teach us to respect the people of this country? Or the people of Kliprand? What does he mean when he says they’re not our kind of people?

Then Mercia refused to argue with him. Jake was intolerant, did not appreciate the difficulties of a previous generation who barely managed to raise their heads above water. You don’t understand how difficult it is to think outside of the dominant ideology, she sighed.

Ideology! Bugger that claptrap, he snarled, that can’t be an excuse. Others managed, why can’t he?

Mercia clutched at straws. Could their father not be thought to mimic obedience to the state? Which made Jake laugh. The old man simply did not make sense, he said, toeing the apartheid line, and at the same time crediting himself with independent thought, with being different.

It was true that Nicholas insisted that they were different, that living amongst the Namaquas did not make Namaquas of the Murrays. The people around them were not their kind, and thus Nicholas taught his children to speak English. Which meant that they were not to play with others who spoke Afrikaans. Besides, the children had each other, and friendship was a dubious category that only led to evil. It would be friends who would persuade them to smoke or drink alcohol, lead them astray to do or think the countless bad things that young people were prone to do. It was, according to their father, important to remember that they did not belong there.

Then where did they belong? they wanted to know.

Nicholas was puzzled by the question. Why belong to any place or any people in particular? They simply belonged, a word that need not be followed by where or to. For a moment Mercia feared that he would say: I am who I am. But he explained that Kliprand was inhabited by uncouth, uneducated people. Yes, their home was there, but the Murrays couldn’t possibly think of belonging there. As long as they could fit in anywhere with decent people, also city people, that was the important thing, that was where they would be at home. By which, of course, he meant English-speaking coloreds with straight hair, skin color being less important than hair, the crucial marker of blackness. Jake guffawed. Did Nicholas not know that all coloreds had European ancestors? If it were only those with visible genetic links that counted, he would happily grow his hair to accentuate the frizz. Which he did.

Thus the notion of home was revised. Decoupled from location and belonging, and crucially from community, it was shrunk into a prefabricated rectangular structure of walls that could be dropped down anywhere as long as it was surrounded by people who looked like them, people related to them. As for Nicholas’s own family, they were raised in respectable God-fearing countryside, Nettie’s at a mission station founded by real Europeans, and even if the Malherbes were Afrikaans speaking, they had good European blood.

Okay, Mercia conceded, the old man was deluded, poisoned by an atrocious apartheid ideology, but he was still their father, a man with many admirable qualities, in short, a good man. As his children, did they not owe him some loyalty, even love?

That’s just moffie talk, girls’ stuff. Certainly not what the mighty Shakespeare thought, Jake, who had studied The Merchant of Venice at Matric, retorted. You should know this. Because Shylock is greedy and evil, his daughter doesn’t owe him any loyalty. And not a word of remorse. “In such a night did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, and with an unthrift love did run from Venice,” he quoted. Mercia envied his ability to remember.

Ah, she said, a good example of the ideology you call claptrap. Shakespeare shows this anti-Semitic nonsense to be wrong, shows us that Shylock is a victim of prejudice and hypocrisy. But Shakespeare himself, trapped in Christian ideology, asks us to approve Jessica’s theft and disloyalty. It’s interesting that she should fall in love with a Christian, but one would expect ambivalence, not an outright rejection of the father; love shouldn’t clench the heart in such an unnatural way.