Zoe Wicomb: October

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 one 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. .

Mercia laughed, relieved that she could set his mind at rest. Are you mad? Do I strike you as someone who could be beaten? No one, she assured him, would as much as try. When apartheid came to an end, and it wouldn’t be long, Craig would come to meet them, and he could see for himself that she was not living with a brute. She felt his anxiety, and so said nothing about his use of the word nonwhite. She shudders to think how her father would have interpreted Craig’s leaving. Would she have told him at all?

Jake, overdressed in a dark pinstripe suit and carrying a leather briefcase, laughed uproariously. Mercia could do with a good hiding, he said. I thought, Grootbaas, all those beatings when we were children were meant to prepare us for marriage. Now Mercia knows what to expect, and I’ll know what my wife will feel when I beat the shit out of her.

It’s no laughing matter, the old man said. I have set you an example. You do not as much as hurt a hair on the head of any woman, let alone a wife. When your mother and I—

Jake interrupted, holding up both palms. Oh please, not another sermon. Look, I promise to choose a wife like Mercia, one who can’t be beaten.

Do you like my gear, Jake said mockingly, once their father had left. This nonsense, it’s what Grootbaas rigged up for me, and you know what? I didn’t have the nerve to say no. So here I am, Mr. Bigshit, I mean Mr. Bigshot, driving a Chevy in my suit and tie. I’m in the liquor business, the only secure business in South Africa, one that will never go under. Your people over there in Britain will pretend to boycott South African products, but you know what? My shares in liquor are doing just fine. So now, and he held out his wide lapels parodically, I’m a proper playboy, hey.

Then he looked her up and down, puzzled by her plain skirt and T-shirt, the scuffed flat shoes. Aren’t you supposed to be some grand professor or something? So what’s it with the clothes? Do you think you have to dress down for us? Are we not good enough for you? For a proper hairdo and makeup? We’re not plaasjapies anymore. I’m a city playboy, don’t you know.

Yes, I mean no, not at all, Mercia stumbled. I teach in a university, that’s all, not a professor. At any rate, not yet. And you, playboy of the Western world, she sighed, for peering ahead, squinting through time, she saw a flash of axe being wielded at their father’s head.

For some time Jake had addressed their father as Grootbaas, a name the old man found amusing. But Mercia knew that Jake simply could not bring himself to call him Father, saw that the child’s fear and dislike of Nicholas had not dissipated with time. Surely that was childish, she said to Jake, surely you can see him as a product of his time?

Mercia was shocked by the bitterness of his reply. Let me be. You left home, you got away, so no need to bother your head with me. But don’t expect me to stand in for you, to be the dutiful child.

On the sideboard there is a photograph of Jake clutching at his mother’s skirts. A plump child, but in those days, in those parts, not wanting to look impoverished, it was known as healthy and strong. The mother is of another era. Her dress sports a bow at the throat, the skirt skims her ankles, and her hair is raked back severely into a bun. Good hair all the same. No hot iron, her husband would proudly offer apropos of nothing, has ever touched that head. If nowadays it is the look of a prude, it is worth remembering that then the severity signaled that she was a good woman. There is further, bucolic virtue in the hand that rests on the haft of a garden spade. There is nothing of the raciness one would expect to find in one called Antoinette.

Some who come across the photograph are surprised. Has Jake not claimed that his mother died in childbirth? That he was responsible for her death?

Nowadays, a disheveled Jake shrugs, Whatever, who gives a shit. And if the speaker is one of those smarty-pants Cape Town types, he may throw in, shockingly, Jou ma se poes, and cackle at the sharp intake of breath. That is Jake’s new thing: being a foulmouthed, lowdown, drunken colored.

Sylvie is furious; she has been betrayed. It further infuriates her that he would never use such language in Mercia’s presence. What use is it being married to a Murray who has sunk lower than the lowest farm laborer?

The poor Antoinette might as well have died in childbirth for all the trouble the boy had been. Fat, in spite of being breast-fed, and jolly as an infant, he was much given to laughter, a levity that turned out to be a precursor to lewdness. At the age of two and a half Jake discovered his penis, which he whipped out at every opportunity, both in public and private, causing his parents unspeakable shame and distress. For all the punishment, the child simply would not understand that he was doing wrong. Once he found the matted doughnut around which Nettie wrapped her hair into a perfect bun, and balancing it over his erect peetie stumbled giggling into the room where a meeting of deacons was being held. They took him to Dr. Groenewald, whose assurance that the child would grow out of it Nicholas thought to be mealy-mouthed. In the meantime, he recommended, circumcision was worth a try, advice that Nicholas scorned. God could not possibly approve of bits of the body being lopped off. He would rather rely on the solution of regular beatings.