A Blade of Grass (2 page)

B
EHIND THE FARMHOUSE
, behind the screen of trees, eucalyptus and a few mulberries, is the kraal where the workers’
rondavels
are situated—circular huts of mud and wattle, with tightly thatched roofs of straw and whitewashed walls—and behind the kraal is the small area of vegetable gardens for the workers—spinach, tomatoes, carrots—and beyond this is the veldt, grasses and shrubs and a few
doringbooms
—thorn trees—and beyond the veldt are the
kloofs
and koppies—the gullies and hills. The orchards and the fields and the river lie in the opposite direction, where the land is fertile. But here are gullies and hills and thorn trees. Here is the koppie called Duiwelskop. It is here that Tembi brings her seeds.

Her dress is a simple cotton garment, blue, patterned with small white flowers, fastened down the front except for the upper two buttons, which are undone because she is hot, and she is alone and there is nobody to look upon her full breasts. Her head is bare, she does not wear a
doek
, as her mother does, for she does not work in the house, or go to town, and so a head scarf is not necessary. Her feet are bare, dusty with dried mud, the soles hard.

It is here Tembi comes, to the hidden side of Duiwelskop, cradling her tin can with its precious cargo of seeds, moist and cool and soft now from soaking in the water. The smooth brow of her oval-shaped face is furrowed with concentration. It is here she will plant the seeds, in this unfrequented place, away from the house and the kraal. Here she will make her garden.

At the foot of the koppie, in the shelter of the rocks, Tembi clears a space. With a hoe taken from the toolshed she slices away the tussocks of
tough grass, then with a garden fork she digs into the soil, turning over the clods of earth and breaking them up. Dropping to her knees she uses a trowel to break the soil up further, removing any pebbles and bits of root. Finally, she sifts the soil through her long, slim fingers, meticulously picking out every twig, every hint of weed, every bit of hard stone.

Earlier, she has pilfered a few handfuls of potash and bonemeal from the supply shed, and added some coffee grounds and crushed eggshells. Using her bare hands she works this mixture into the soil, squeezing, sifting, combing, and caressing. Tenderly she does this, for this is her patch of earth now, her garden, her place on the farm. This small piece of the land, measuring not more than a couple of feet in either direction, is hers now.

Tembi makes a trip to the washhouse tap, and returns with a red plastic bucket of water, careful lest she is seen, careful lest she spill a drop, for water will be precious here. She has chosen the place so that the warm morning sun can fall directly on the plot of earth, and in the heat of the afternoon the rocks will cast a cooling shade.

In the gullies beyond the koppie Tembi breaks branches from the
doringboom
trees and builds a barrier around her patch of earth, long sharp thorns to keep out small animals, such as the
duikers
that roam the hills and might wander here in search of tender green shoots. She carries stones and small rocks to build a low wall, artfully placing them to mimic the natural arrangement of the koppie’s rocks and boulders. Only a careful inspection would reveal that a garden exists here. But who would care to look? The place is safe.

Her arms are nicked with scratches from the thorns, the muscles in her back are weary, her fingernails are ragged. But her garden is built.

Now she must plant the seeds.

Tembi pokes a hole into the soil with her forefinger, gently, one, two, three, four, five times, each small depression to the same depth, just past the second knuckle of her finger. Then a small scoop of water with her palm to pour into each hole. The seeds are cool and moist and softened from lying in the dampness of the tin can. A pale white seed into each dark receptacle. Then the soil is brushed gently over the seeds, and smoothed, and patted down softly. In each spot where a seed is hidden Tembi places a single tiny pebble. She scoops water again with her palm and wets the
earth, and the aroma of the dampened soil rises to her nostrils, like the smell of the countryside that wafts across the fields in the summer when the afternoon rains have fallen and the land is wet and fragrant. The smell of life to come. But today only here, in this place, this hidden place.

She sits back on her haunches. She is alone. There is only the koppie and the empty countryside and the blue sky. Her heart is beating, with pleasure, with her secret knowledge, with anticipation. This now is her own acre of the world, her garden, her farm, her country. Her secret. Here she will grow that which does not as yet grow. From here the sweetness will come. A gift.

T
HERE USED TO BE
another place. Not this place, but before this place. Before the Relocation. Grace lived there and Tembi lived there and her father, Elias, lived there. It was the place of their family and the place of their people.

The hills were grass-covered, rich with green grass fed from the streams that ran down the
kloofs
and rolled into the distant valley. The cattle were well fed on the rich green grass, and fat. The maize plants grew tall and the cobs were thick and abundant.

In the mornings a mist covered the hills, and in the afternoons, after rain, a mist covered the hills, and in between the sun was bright on the hills and the birds sang. The fields were fertile, the water was sweet, and in the valley the people were happy.

The name of the place was Ezulwini, The Valley of Heaven.

On a day like any other day, at the end of the summer, a car drove along the winding track through the hills and up to the place called Ezulwini. Because this was a rare occurrence, and because the car was seen for many miles and by many people before it finally reached the village, a large group of onlookers had gathered to greet the unexpected visitor. Because of this, the news that the visitor brought that day fell on many ears all at once.

Two men emerged from the car, one black man wearing a much-worn dark suit and a tie, and one white man, who wore sunglasses and did not take them off.

The village headman came forward, greetings were made, hospitality
was offered, food and drink, but the white man shook his head and said, No, there was no time. And so the other man drew a sheet of paper from his pocket and began to read what was written there.

The government had declared that this land was no longer the land of the people who lived there. Another place had been declared their land and all who lived here must now go and live there in that other place.

The headman said he did not understand this declaration. This land was the land of the people and had always been so, and he did not understand what this declaration meant. No doubt it was a mistake on the part of the government.

The man in the suit looked at the man in sunglasses, who obviously understood the language being spoken, because he said, “No mistake,” and then added in Afrikaans,
“Maak hulle verstaan.”
Make them understand.

So the schoolteacher was fetched, a man who knew something of life in the cities, and he read the paper for himself, and then read it aloud to the village headman, and said, “The government is telling us to leave this place and make our homes in another place.”

The village headman shook his head again and said, “I do not understand this government. Such a thing is not possible.”

And now the white man in the sunglasses, who had been leaning against his car with his arms folded, became impatient with all this discussion and said to his assistant, “Give him the paper.” He turned to the headman and instructed, “Two weeks. You have two weeks to get ready.”

The visitors climbed back into their car and drove the long winding track that led through the hills, and the small boys ran after the car laughing in the dust while the village elders gathered around the paper to examine it, as if by studying it further they would understand how their land and their home could be declared not their land and not their home. But they could not understand the reasons, which were formulated by ideologues in the distant cities and on the fertile farms, men and women who had decided that it was the will of God that the races must live separately and that the white race was ordained to remain superior.

After two weeks had passed, the trucks came, and the people were
required to place all their belongings on the trucks, then to climb aboard themselves. Their cattle and their goats and their furniture and their tools were also placed on the trucks. A detachment of policemen stood by to ensure that this loading was orderly.

The trucks drove down the long winding track that led through the hills of Ezulwini, The Valley of Heaven, and this time there were no small boys to run laughing after the vehicles. On the following day two bulldozers were brought up to the empty village, and the huts were knocked down and flattened by the bulldozers and the debris spread across the fields so that the place entered the silence of the hills and lost its name. In other places along the frontier of the country, other villages were being relocated, lives uprooted, new places created while the old places were exiled into silence. It was the command of the government.

The new place had no name, because no one had ever lived there. The government erected huts and installed a water outlet, and then the trucks departed.

In the new place where Tembi came with her mother and father, the soil was hard against the plows and yielded little in the way of crops. The seeds that the government had provided were weak in their growth. The cattle grew thin. During that first winter many of the villagers became ill with influenza. Because the harvest was poor, because the soil was hard, because the seed was weak, some of the young men left the village and made the journey into the city where there was work in the gold mines and the factories. But the money they sent back to their parents and their families from the mines was not enough, and soon other men left for the city. Tembi’s father, Elias, was among the men who went to dig the gold out of the mines. The soil remained hard, the seed poor. Then some of the women left the village and went to the towns and the cities to find jobs as house servants, as maids and cooks and washers of laundry.

By the time of the second winter the population of the village consisted of mostly the young and the old—children and their grandparents. In the winter of that year Tembi became ill with influenza and spent long hours huddled in her hut, wrapped in a blanket next to the kerosene stove. Her father sent money for medicine but it was never enough. The inhabitants of the village began to drift from this place without a name, to find work
on farms and factories elsewhere. If there was a name for this place it was only Sorrow.

When the winter ended, Tembi’s mother heard about a job as a cook on a farm in another district. She asked the schoolteacher to write a letter of recommendation, and she made the long journey to the farm to apply in person.

The Missus at the farm, an old Afrikaner woman who lived only with her husband, took a liking to Grace and said she could have the job and come and cook in the farmhouse and live in the kraal. So Grace left the village, and took Tembi to the farm. Not many months later, the old couple decided to leave the farm because of the Missus’s ill health. Their son drove up in his car from the city and walked around the farm, writing down in a book the quantity of cattle, the yield of the maize, the number of workers. He stayed only two days before leaving. The farm was put up for sale.

Those who worked on the farm, who lived in the huts of the kraal, who tended the cattle and tilled the fields and cooked the food, waited to see what would become of their lives, for everything depended on who would own the farm.

The farm was sold to a young man from the city, who came with his young bride. One of the first things he did was change the name of the farm from Duiwelskop to Kudufontein. He organized the men to repair the fences, to whitewash the outside walls of the
rondavels
in the kraal. A contractor from Klipspring came to build a washhouse of cement blocks and install a water tap in the kraal where there had been none before. The young man bought and sold cattle, so that the herd was healthy, and he replanted some of the fields. For three months the farm was a flurry of activity and change.

Now Grace works in the farmhouse, cooking and cleaning. Tembi works in the dairy with the other girls, where they milk the cows and make the butter and the cream.

Tembi has only seen her father once in the past year, when he came back from the mines for two weeks on his annual leave. He sends letters, he sends money, sometimes a small gift. In his letters to Grace he asks her to save as much money as she can, as he will do too, so that one day he can
leave the mines, so that one day he too can buy a plot of land for his family, so that he can plant the seeds and till the soil.

For Tembi, life has been broken apart. The people she knew before the Relocation are scattered. Ezulwini is no more. She is a stranger here.

M
ÄRIT APPEARS
at the kitchen door, not entering, but hanging back as if she must ask permission from Grace before coming in. The kitchen is Grace’s domain. Just as Grace is uncomfortable in the rest of the house, so Märit feels herself to be a trespasser here. She has tried to be friendlier with Grace, the way she was with Miriam, the woman who worked in the house when Märit was a girl. But maybe the laws of apartheid are more rigid here in the countryside, for Grace maintains a dignified distance and sometimes seems puzzled by Märit’s attempts to blur the lines between mistress and servant.

Grace looks up from where she is slicing carrots at the table and directs a quizzical glance at the pale face of the woman standing in the doorway. She rises, wiping her hands on the front of her apron.

“Missus?

“Is there any hot water left in the kettle, Grace? I want to take a flask of tea to my husband…to Baas Ben…”

“Yes, Missus, I can make it.”

“No, no, you carry on with what you are doing. I’ll do it.” She brushes the hair from her face and moves to the sink.

Grace sits down again and continues cutting the carrots while Märit spoons some tea into the pot and adds hot water, and as the tea steeps she fetches a handful of biscuits from the tin in the pantry. When the tea is ready Märit pours it into a Thermos flask with some milk and a spoonful of sugar. The biscuits she wraps in a sheet of waxed paper before placing them in the pocket of her dress.

Outside the house the landscape seems cloaked in stillness. It is always
this way, even when the tractor is plowing, and the cattle are lowing at milking time, and the voices of the farm hands are calling. The sky and the distance make all sounds small and insignificant. She stands on the veranda, feeling herself shrink from the landscape, as if the silence will absorb her as well. When she descends the steps and walks across the gravel driveway, it seems she floats above the earth, not a part of it, her passage hardly disturbing a blade of grass.

She is wearing a light cardigan over her dress, for it was cool in the house, and already the material prickles against her arms as she steps into the heat.

Märit walks down and across the rock garden and past the windmill, through the orchard where the new fruit is still small and green and hard on the branches, until she reaches the edge of the field where Ben intends to plant his almond seedlings.

Ben comes from the industrial north of England, and even as a boy in that country he had looked with longing on the fields, the neat rows of crops, the cattle peaceful in the pastures. Even as a boy he wanted to be a farmer. Not an insurance salesman like his father, selling life policies to factory workers. He has told Märit of a childhood memory of almond trees in blossom, the white flowers swaying in the breeze like the white foam that blows across the waves of the ocean. When Märit first met Ben, before he had this farm, he talked often of this dream of his, for it struck some deep chord in his soul, even though he was a child, and the memory has beckoned to him all his life.

Now he has his farm, where he can plant his almond trees. Märit has no dream of her own for the farm, but she responds to this longing in him, although it unsettles her a bit too, for she likes to think of him as an uncomplicated man, a steady, plain man, without talk of longings and souls. This talk of yearning unsettles her because she relies on Ben to be strong and plain and understandable, the rock against which she can secure her own vague, troubling sense of displacement and anxiety.

As she crosses the plowed soil she stumbles a bit on the hard clods of earth, realizing that she ought to have changed her shoes. But she forgets these simple things often. There seems to be a separation between the house and the countryside around it that she must constantly cross, yet
when she crosses that border she does not know how to be, where to go, what to do. She tries to think of herself as a farmer, as a farmer’s wife, but the truth is that only in the house can she find some purpose. The land seems to be in possession of the workers and there is no place for her to function.

It’s different for Ben. When his father died at fifty from a heart attack, sitting in his car outside a small suburban house in Manchester, Ben realized he could leave. His mother had passed away two years earlier, and now he has no further connection to the drab streets of his childhood. He came to this country because he heard that there was land available, that there were farms to purchase, that the government wanted farmers, especially on the border. Grants were available and the land was cheap and fertile.

This is Ben’s dream. To be a farmer. He has come to this country as an immigrant, has learned the languages, has learned the climate and the geography and the history. He has even changed the spelling of his name from Lawrence to Laurens, to an Afrikaans spelling, not so much to disguise his origins—his accent will always testify to that—but as a commitment to a new life, as an accommodation to the place where he intends to live.

It’s different for Ben; he is the Baas, they accept him, they rely on him, they defer to him. Ben wants to be here, he wants to farm, to work on the land. And she is here because of Ben, for Ben.

She sees the figures on the far side of the field, and recognizes her husband from the hat that he habitually wears outside. The men are stringing long strands of shiny wire between the posts that were dug into the ground on the previous two days. Fences are a fact of life here: to keep what is yours inside, to keep those who desire what is yours outside. This is a land of separations—between veldt and cultivated, between wild and domestic, between black and white.

Ben glances over as she approaches and straightens up, handing his oversized pliers to one of the workers. He smiles at her. The work stops, the other three men turning to watch her approach. Ben steps forward, a tall man, his face already sun-darkened around his mustache, laugh lines etched at the corners of his eyes, for he is a man who smiles often.

“I thought you might be thirsty. I’ve brought you some tea.” She offers the Thermos to Ben, not looking at the other men.

“Wonderful. You are a godsend, darling.” He kisses her, the stubble on his chin brushing her cheek, and she smells the soil of the country and the hot air and his perspiration and his tobacco. The smell of him, which she knows now.

He turns and says to the men, “We’ll take a rest now.” They sink to their haunches, setting their tools aside. One of them produces a little bag of tobacco and begins to roll a cigarette.

“Good afternoon,” Märit says to them.

“Missus.” They smile, they nod their heads. She does not know their names, and there is nothing she can think of to say to them.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” Ben asks.

“Accounts. Talking to Grace. Nothing much, really.” She does not say that she is lonely. “Grace wants a few days off to visit a sick cousin.”

“Does she? Well, that’s good. That’s fine. We can fend for ourselves, can’t we?”

“Of course. Grace has a daughter, Tembi, who will come in to help.”

“Good. Excellent.” He unscrews the cap of the Thermos and pours some tea into it. “Want some?”

“No, it’s for you.” She watches him drink, the way his Adam’s apple moves as he swallows, a glint of perspiration on his neck where it disappears into his shirt. She wants to put her hand there, to feel the pulse of his energy. She looks at the men, then away.

“I brought some biscuits too. Are you hungry?”

“Famished.” Ben unwraps the waxed paper, then hesitates and looks over at the men, who are sitting on the ground regarding Märit with mild curiosity. “I’ll have the tea first,” he says, and puts the biscuits in a pocket.

“Sorry, I didn’t think to bring enough for them too.”

“Oh, they’ll be all right.”

She knows he is embarrassed to eat the biscuits in front of the men. And she knows that he will share the biscuits with them when she leaves.

“How is the work going here?” Märit asks.

His face lights up. “Fine, fine. But there won’t be enough wire to enclose the whole field. I’ll have to go into Klipspring and get some more.”

“Today?” Today, she hopes—now—so that she can ride with him into the town, so that she can speak to people, so that she can sit on the terrace
of the Retief Hotel and drink something sweet and cool, with ice in the glass.

“No, there’s no hurry. I’m waiting for that shipment of seedlings to come in on the train. Tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

Ben replaces the cap of the Thermos and screws the cover back on. He glances over at the men waiting patiently. Märit senses that he wants to get back to work. He is always eager to get back to work; his energy for the farm is boundless.

“Well,” Märit says. “I’ll see you at supper.”

“Yes, darling. I’ll see you then.” He smiles and touches her arm lightly. “What will you do now?”

“I’m going to take a walk.” She gestures vaguely at the countryside around them.

Ben kisses her again, on the cheek this time, and squeezes her hand.

As if this is their signal to resume work, the men rise to their feet and nod to her as she passes. She walks on, away from the house. And when she looks back she sees Ben handing out the biscuits to his helpers. Märit envies the men, because they have their work, because they have their place on this farm, but most of all because they have his company.

She waves, but Ben does not see her.

T
HE SILENCE RETURNS
. Almost before Märit is out of the men’s sight, the sounds fade behind her—the sound of their voices, the sound of their tools, the sound of Ben’s voice—and then she hears only the birds and she is alone.

This is wild country. The farms are miles apart, the towns even farther. She cannot place herself exactly, not geographically, not spiritually. This is not like the place where she grew up, where the gardens that lined the suburban streets were lush from the sprinklers that hissed their mist every morning and evening. Not like the city, where nature took the form of manicured parks behind wrought-iron fences, where the signs on the gates read “Whites Only.” Not like the stretch of coast where she went with her parents on a holiday, where sugarcane plantations grew right up
to the railway line that separated the strip of beach and hotels from the rest of the country. Not like the farm where she went one summer when she was sixteen to stay with a school friend, in the wine country, just outside the city, where mimosa grew abundant and there was a swimming pool.

This is a wild country with a history that Märit does not understand—a contested history, of which she has only a vague understanding. In the schools she attended, history begins with the arrival of a ship at the Cape, when a white man claims the country. Before that it is a history of other people, whose story is considered unimportant. They have no history. She knows that her education has been stilted, that her thinking is conventional, that her life is unremarkable. She knows all these things, but the knowledge does not make it any easier to stand here under the weight of the silence.

This is a wild country—perhaps it belongs only to the animals.

There are animals in the valleys and the forests and on the veldt. She has not seen them for she does not venture into those places, but she has heard the stories, told by the farmers who come to visit Ben, who sit in the living room with coffee and rusks and sometimes a glass of apple brandy. Stories of the leopard that took a child from a village in the middle of the night, of elephants drunk on marula berries rampaging through fields of maize, of the baboons that invaded a house when the owners were absent and pillaged the kitchen and left excrement on the table.

Märit talks to Koos van Staden, the nearest neighbor, about animals, because she wants to see them; like a tourist from the city she wants to see wild animals. This is the wild country around here and she wants to see the wild animals and the real Africa.

“No, Mevrou,” van Staden says, laughing in a good-natured way at her innocence and naïveté, “you won’t see much around here anymore. This is all farming country now, the wild things have been driven away into hiding. They are out there, and they see us, but we don’t see them.

“But,” he says, “sometimes a troop of baboons will come down into the mealie fields, usually if there is a drought. They like the mealies.” He laughs again and says, “I remember when I was a kid and my father still ran the farm—in those days we had quite a problem with the baboons. There was a troop of them that lived in the hills and they would wait until
just before we harvested the mealies. I don’t know how they knew, but they would come down out of the hills in the early morning and ruin the whole field. It happened regularly.

“They are very clever animals,” he continues, “but they can sometimes be damn stupid. Now, what your baboon does when he gets to the mealie field is pick a couple of cobs and stick them under his arm, but then instead of taking those off with him to eat somewhere he picks a few more, and of course he doesn’t have any way to carry them, except to tuck them under his arm, which he does. And he goes through the whole row of mealies doing this, so that by the time he reaches the end, he still has only two or three cobs under his arm. And in his wake are all your mealies lying on the ground. You can imagine what happens when a troop of twenty of them get into the fields.

“My old man used to go up into the hills with his rifle and spend the whole day up there. I would hear the shots, but when he came back he would only shake his head. A baboon is clever that way—he knows what a gun is, he knows when you are after him, and he hides.

“But we finally got rid of those baboons. Not with guns or fences or anything like that. One of the old black workers on the farm told us what we should do. So, we built a kind of trap and put some nice food in there, food from the table, and early one morning we heard a terrible noise and when we ran out there was a baboon in the trap. Very angry too. He’d eaten the food, of course, but now he wanted to leave and he was screaming his head off. And there, just on the other side of the fence, we saw his brothers and sisters shouting to him. They have their own language, you know, and they look out for each other, just like people.