Zoe Wicomb - October

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.