Authors: Shamim Sarif
The World Unseen (16 page)
No answer from the darkness, just the occasional flash of the whites of his eyes, and the feeling of his body there, very near to hers in that vast, empty night. She needed a cloth to bind his leg, a blanket to keep him warm. She looked back towards where she thought the shop was. Should she bring him back to the outhouses and let him stay there? What if Omar found him? What if he stole things?
“I don’t need your help,” His voice rasped at her, much nearer than she had thought.
“I can bring you a blanket and a bandage for your leg.”
No reply. An effort was being made, there were heavy breaths and a small groan of pain. He was trying to stand, and she saw his head bob into the light. She put down the lamp and he weaved uncertainly on his feet. Without thinking, she moved forward and grasped his arm, uncovered even in that cold, and he leaned on her for one second, his tall body against her slim frame, before he stood upright again. She immediately let go of him, blushing in the dark, amazed at her audacity. If her family ever knew she had touched a black man in such a way, they would be scandalised. No matter what the circumstances.
“Let me get you some…
”
“I don’t need your help,” he said, his voice stronger now and hard. He looked at her with contempt, then he turned and limped away from her.
She felt like crying, overwhelmed by the dark night, the hatred, the blood. Did he see her as white? As someone as bad as the farmer? She began to walk back to the shop and saw the water jug before her, untouched. Stopping to pick it up, she half-ran the short distance back, till she came within sight of the
stoep
. The farmer’s car was gone, and the house seemed completely dark. She walked silently around to the front, and saw Omar’s light in the shop, his shadow moving back and forth among the sacks of goods. She hurried back to the kitchen door, stopped at the step and plunged her hands into the water, rubbing furiously to remove the blood that she could smell on her fingers. Then she threw out the water and reached up for the door handle. It was locked. She tried again, and this time saw her husband’s lamp swing into the far end of the kitchen from the shop and come down to the back door where she stood, tense and still. Omar held the lamp up to the window and looked out at her, then turned the key in the lock and stood back to let her enter.
She surprised herself when she walked in as normal, as though she were returning from the garden in broad daylight. She went to the table, put down the lamp, straightened her cardigan, and pulled up a sleeve that she now noticed had blood on it.
“Where have you been?” he said quietly.
“In the laundry room,” she said. “I wanted to get a clean blanket.” Her tone was calm and steady, but the lie did not ring true and she knew it. For one thing, she wasn’t holding any blanket. He came to where she stood, and he leaned in to her. She put up her hands, thinking he was going to strike her, but he only sniffed at her as a dog sniffs an unfamiliar object. She knew immediately what he would smell, that he would sense the faint, sweet odour of the injured man’s sweat and blood on her clothing, and this time when he stepped forward again he hit her. The strike was hard and she staggered back, bruising her hip against the table, and she kept her hands up for the next blow. It hit her across the face despite her shielding, splitting her lip and causing an thin stream of blood to course down her chin and neck. For the first time since she had re-entered the house, she became aware that the baby was crying in the room above.
He hit her four times and it was a shock to her, that he had come to this at last. She stood against the counter, arms up over her face, and when he stopped she could not look at him. Neither could he look at her. Instead he put down the oil lamp and went upstairs without another word.
She had always dreaded this moment; not out of physical fear, though certainly she had been scared. But because she knew it would be a terrible thing to have to understand about your husband, that he would really hit you, and she had always thought when she was younger that hitting was the one thing that she would never tolerate. But now it had happened and she knew that she would go upstairs when he had calmed down. What else was there to do with the children in their beds, and no other place to go to? She knew him better than he knew himself, knew he would hate what he had just done. She could visualise him in the bathroom upstairs, washing his hands as though that would remove the taint of the violence; combing back his hair without meeting his own eyes in the mirror. She tasted the blood filling her mouth, and it tasted as she imagined metal would taste, cool and sharp. Blood like his, like the injured African’s, there on the road.
Miriam straightened up, waited until her dizziness had passed, and then she went to the pump and put her head beneath it, until the drying blood had washed away. She was freezing cold and her limbs were stiff and she was shaking. With legs like lead, she walked up the stairs to the baby’s room, but when she opened the door and looked, she realised that the crying had stopped. She walked tiredly over to the cot and watched the child sleeping now, her chubby pink fists raised as if in fight above her head. Miriam felt like weeping, but she did not. She wiped her hand absently upon her skirt, then reached down with the tips of her fingers and stroked the soft, dark down on the baby’s head. “Sleep,” she said to the child, and she watched her for a while and then went to face Omar.
R
OBERT PULLED AND HEAVED
at the wooden door to the cellar, as Miriam stood nearby, watching the boy struggling.
“Didn’t you just go down there last week?” she asked him.
“Yes, Madam. It was okay then,” he confirmed. “Let me keep trying Madam. It is just stuck from the rain.”
Miriam nodded, and went back out to the shop, where Christina, the maid at the Weston farm, was still looking leisurely through the merchandise on offer. Although they sold mostly basic items, Christina eagerly looked forward to her weekly visits here and always noticed anything new.
“Can I help you find anything?” Miriam asked. She glanced back and watched as Robert pulled with all his weight at the cellar door. The wood creaked loudly, and then slowly began to move upwards. Miriam smiled.
“No, not to worry, Missus,” replied Christina. “I’m just looking at these fabrics. I’m thinking of a new dress one of these days.”
Miriam nodded, barely listening. “Take your time, Christina,” she said, and she went back to see how Robert was doing.
In the black square that lay open in the floor, only the top rungs of a wooden ladder were visible. She looked at Robert, who stood with his feet right at the edge of the darkness beneath them.
“I will go down there, Madam,” he said, preparing to descend but Miriam’s voice held him back.
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m looking for. I’ll go down.”
“But there are many spiders there, Madam,” Robert replied, with only a trace of a smile. Miriam considered this information for a moment and then looked at the boy, who was grinning now. “Sometimes there are snakes also,” he added.
“I’m looking for a box of books,” Miriam told him. “The books I used to have when I was a girl. They are novels,” she added.
“I know books,” replied Robert. “I can find them.”
He was small and lithe and he scrambled down the ladder in a few seconds, pausing on the last rung before dropping down to the cellar floor with a thud. He waited with patience for a few moments, until his eyes adjusted to the close darkness around him. Then he went directly to a stack of boxes that had stood undisturbed in the back of the cellar for as long as he could recall.
Out in the shop, Christina was ringing the bell. Miriam hurried into the shop and looked at Christina, who still held the bell in her hand.
“I thought you had all gone home,” Christina said, laughing nervously.
“We live here,” Miriam said, and raised her eyes to the ceiling where she could hear the steps of her husband. No doubt the insistent ringing had roused him from his afternoon sleep. She moved swiftly halfway up the stairs, and saw Omar on his way back from the bathroom.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was outside with Robert and Christina kept ringing the bell.”
He nodded, still groggy with sleep.
“Go back,” Miriam urged him in a low voice. “Sleep for a while. I’ll wake you soon.”
“I’m up now,” he said irritably.
Miriam looked defeated. “All right,” she said. “But you don’t have to rush. Take your time.”
He glanced at her, suspicious at her insistence, but she was already running back down the stairs.
At last Christina was gone, and Miriam returned at once to the cellar door. Within seconds a cardboard box appeared, followed by the head of Robert. He pushed it onto the floor with some effort, and presented it to Miriam with a sweep of his hand.
“Books, Madam.”
Miriam kneeled down and pulled the box open. They were indeed her books, the ones that she had brought with her by boat from India and then by truck from Pretoria.
“You forgot them, Madam?” asked Robert, watching as Miriam emptied them from the box and touched them all, one by one.
“Yes,” she replied. “Until someone reminded me.”
She sorted through them quickly, not taking the time to open them or recall the last time they had been read. Those recollections and re-readings she would save for another day when she was lonely again in the quiet of the late evening. She piled them all around her – there must have been fifteen books in all – and picked up
Far From the Madding Crowd
and
Jane Eyre
, but settled finally upon
Little Women
, which she remembered well from her school days. As a schoolgirl, she had always imagined herself as the fiery, independent character Jo, but when she thought about it now, it was someone else that she pictured in that role.
Miriam carried the book into the shop. She could hear Omar’s steps upstairs and she knew also that her children would be returning from school at any moment. She placed the book gently on the counter and searched some drawers, finding a sheet of brown paper and some string. She looked longingly for a moment at the festive wrapping paper that lay in sheets at the other end of the counter, but she knew that Omar would miss it if she were to use some. She lifted the cover of the book, and revealed a clean, white page, slightly spotted with damp, but clean all the same. A page for writing upon, for leaving an inscription on.
Miriam hesitated, but she went to get a pen. This pen she then held poised above the flyleaf for at least three minutes, while she hesitated as to the best words to send to the recipient. Finally the pen moved down:
“
To the lover
”
Miriam wrote, and then paused. She scrutinised the strokes made by her pen on the page and seemed satisfied that the letters were neatly made. She had been good at English handwriting at school, all those years ago. She leaned over and wrote again, completing the sentence:
“To the lover of books
,
Love
Miriam”
She had stopped again at the word “love”, uncertain whether “regards” or something similar might not be better. But then she had decided that for anyone else she would have had little hesitation signing with love, and saw no reason to be so tentative now. She waited for the black ink to dry, blowing on it a little anxiously when she became aware again of Omar’s footsteps. She heard him say something to Robert and heard the boy come downstairs.
She shut the book and deftly wrapped it. Then the string was passed twice around the parcel and secured in a bow, and she quickly wrote in block capitals the address in Pretoria.
“Robert,” she called, and the boy came in from the kitchen. “Here,” she said, holding the parcel out to him. “Take this.” From her purse she extracted more money than she believed the postage would cost and handed it to him.
“Take this to the Post Office tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay, Madam.” He carefully turned over the package. “Is it a book?”
“Yes,” she replied, and for the first time she allowed herself to feel some hesitation at this idea of hers. She heard Omar’s step on the stairs and held out her hand to Robert, wanting suddenly to take the book back. He held onto it tightly, however, and whispered reassuringly that he would post it for her the next morning. Then he was gone, attending to the vegetables in the sink, with the book safely in his pocket and Miriam turned to the stairs just in time to greet her husband.
The parcel lay in the Post Office for two weeks before it was eventually collected with the mail. Miss Smith, the postmistress, had been forced to keep it outside Amina’s post box because of its size, and she had kept it beside her, and had become used to the sight of it among the rubber stamps and books of coupons, and after a while had ceased to recognise it as something waiting to be delivered.
She noticed it again, finally, when she spilt some red ink on its outer wrapping. It was covered unassumingly in smooth brown paper and tied with plain string, and when Miss Smith knocked over the ink and saw the spreading blot of red, she picked up the package and muttered to herself in Afrikaans that at the age of sixty three she was losing her mind already, and what hope was there for the rest of her old age? She turned the parcel over in her hands, which were freckled from younger days spent as much as possible in the sun, then placed it right before her in the little window from which she served customers, because she knew that Jacob Williams would be in again today, and that he would be able to pass it on, at last, to Amina.
It was just past eleven o’clock when Jacob came into the post office to collect the mail for the café. He came twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Amina left the mail collection to him, partly because she usually forgot about it altogether, and partly because she had been with him to the Post Office once, and she had noticed that he and Miss Smith seemed to enjoy a mild flirtation of some kind.
“Morning, ma’am,” said Jacob, tipping his hat to the postmistress. She smiled and her eyes seemed to him to be more blue than ever. They were like crackling neon, Jacob decided as he watched her, not like any colour he had ever seen in nature.
“Good morning, Mr Williams,” she replied and she asked after his health, and he asked after hers, and they chatted for a few minutes across the counter, before another customer came in. The man saw Jacob leaning against the Whites Only counter, smiling at the postmistress, and he frowned. Jacob turned and moved smartly over to the counter from which Coloured people were supposed to be served and he waited patiently while Miss Smith, who was the only Post Office employee present in the mornings, served the newcomer. She tore off strips of stamps with efficiency, and ignored the angry stare of her customer.
“Its warm out, isn’t it?” she said to the man, and she looked at him over the steel rims of her spectacles, noting the sweat that dripped down the side of his head. Inside the Post Office it was cool and quiet, with only the reassuring sounds of Miss Smith’s rubber stamps and till echoing into the atmosphere. The windows were high up in the walls and they cast broad squares of sunlight into the room, but the area around the counters was shaded. On the ceiling, two fans whirred gently, producing soft currents of air that circled above them.
The man used his sleeve to wipe his forehead. “You can say that again,” he muttered in reply, and he looked up at Jacob who was studying the notices that were posted on the wall beyond. Miss Smith pushed some stamps across the glass divide in the centre of the counter, and told the man the price. She waited with her hand on the till, but he was still watching Jacob. She felt a prick of nervous tension in the tips of her fingers.
“Hey, boy,” he called across the room and for a moment, despite being the only other customer of the Post Office, Jacob did not understand that the words were directed at him.
“Hey!” the man called again. Jacob looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Get me some water, boy,” he said and jerked his head in the direction of the drinking fountain which stood in the back corner. Jacob watched him, and ran his hand over his head. By nature, he was not a man who made decisions quickly, and in this particular circumstance he found he suddenly had a lot to think about. Jacob would gladly have walked a mile to bring a glass of water to someone who asked him politely, but there was no way he would answer the disrespect which had just been shown. To be called “boy” by someone twenty years his junior was too much. But then again, he hated to make trouble. And he hated to do so in front of Miss Smith.
“Go on,” shouted the man. “You understand English, don’t you?”
Jacob burned with anger and embarrassment but his body remained relaxed and still. He looked completely at ease, although he could not quite bring himself to look at Miss Smith. The postmistress, however, was not looking at him. She had already moved out to the other side of the counter.
“There’s no need for that,” she said sharply to the customer. “I am the employee here and I will get you the water if you are incapable of getting it yourself.”
Miss Smith had spent twenty years of her life teaching mathematics in a secondary school and was still accustomed to treating people who were younger than she as ageing pupils, to be guided, praised or reprimanded as the situation required. She moved briskly to the water fountain, filled a glass beaker with tepid water and held it out to the man.
“Here you are,” she said.
He was incredulous. “What’s the matter with you, lady? Haven’t you heard of
apartheid
?”
For a moment, as she looked into his face, Miss Smith saw the face of her only son, who lived in England now. There was no real resemblance between this man and the boy of whom she was so proud, but they could have been the same age, and a shudder caught the postmistress as she saw the surprise in the eyes before her, and she felt keenly how easily a young mind could be educated into ignorance. She blinked, realising the man was still staring at her and she remembered his question, the tail-ends of his words still echoing in the high corners of the room.