Kitabı oku: «The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two», sayfa 9

Flavours of Exile

At the foot of the hill, near the well, was the vegetable garden, an acre fenced off from the Big Field whose earth was so rich that mealies grew there year after year ten feet tall. Nursed from that fabulous soil, carrots, lettuces, beets, tasting as I have never found vegetables taste since, loaded our table and the tables of our neighbours. Sometimes, if the garden boy was late with the supply for lunch, I would run down the steep pebbly path through the trees at the back of the hill, and along the red dust of the wagon road until I could see the windlass under its shed of thatch. There I stopped. The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head: two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds, rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jewelled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes. Around the fence grew lemons, pawpaws, bananas, shapes of gold and yellow in their patterns of green.

In another five minutes I would be dragging from the earth carrots ten inches long, and so succulent they snapped between two fingers. I ate my allowance of these before the cook could boil them and drown them in the white flour sauce without which – and unless they were served in the large china vegetable dishes brought from that old house in London – they were not carrots to my mother.

For her, that garden represented a defeat.

When the family first came to the farm, she built vegetable beds on the kopje near the house. She had in her mind, perhaps, a vision of the farmhouse surrounded by out buildings and gardens like a hen sheltering its chicks.

The kopje was all stone. As soon as the grass was cleared off its crown where the house stood, the fierce rains beat the soil away. Those first vegetable beds were thin sifted earth walled by pebbles. The water was brought up from the well in the water-cart.

‘Water is gold,’ grumbled my father, eating peas which he reckoned must cost a shilling a mouthful. ‘Water is gold!’ he came to shout at last, as my mother toiled and bent over those reluctant beds. But she got more pleasure from them than she ever did from the exhaustless plenty of the garden under the hill.

At last, the spaces in the bush where the old beds had been were seeded by wild or vagrant plants, and we children played there. Someone must have thrown away gooseberries, for soon the low-spreading bushes covered the earth. We used to creep under them, William MacGregor and I, lie flat on our backs, and look through the leaves at the brilliant sky, reaching around us for the tiny sharp-sweet yellow fruits in their jackets of papery white. The smell of the leaves was spicy. It intoxicated us. We would laugh and shout, then quarrel; and William, to make up, shelled a double handful of the fruit and poured it into my skirt, and we ate together, pressing the biggest berries on each other. When we could eat no more, we filled baskets and took them to the kitchen to be made into that rich jam which – if allowed to burn just the right amount on the pan – is the best jam in the world, clear sweet amber, with lumps of sticky sharpness in it, as if the stings of bees were preserved in honey.

But my mother did not like it. ‘Cape gooseberries!’ she said bitterly. ‘They aren’t gooseberries at all. Oh, if I could let you taste a pie made of real English gooseberries.’

In due course, the marvels of civilization made this possible; she found a tin of gooseberries in the Greek store at the station, and made us a pie.

My parents and William’s ate the pie with a truly religious emotion.

It was this experience with the gooseberries that made me cautious when it came to brussels sprouts. Year after year my mother yearned for brussels sprouts, whose name came to represent to me something exotic and for ever unattainable. When at last she managed to grow half a dozen spikes of this plant, in one cold winter which offered us sufficient frost, she of course sent a note to the MacGregors, so that they might share the treat. They came from Glasgow, they came from Home, and they could share the language of nostalgia. At the table the four grown-ups ate the bitter little cabbages and agreed that the soil of Africa was unable to grow food that had any taste at all. I said scornfully that I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. But William, three years older than myself, passed his plate up and said he found them delicious. It was like a betrayal; and afterwards I demanded how he could like such flavourless stuff. He smiled at me and said it cost us nothing to pretend, did it?

That smile, so gentle, a little whimsical, was a lesson to me and I remembered it when it came to the affair of the cherries. She found a tin of cherries at the store, we ate them with cream; and while she sighed over memories of barrows loaded with cherries in the streets of London, I sighed with her, ate fervently, and was careful not to meet her eyes.

And when she said: ‘The pomegranates will be fruiting soon,’ I would offer to run down and see how they progressed; and returned from the examination saying: ‘It won’t be long now, really it won’t – perhaps next year.’

The truth was, my emotion over the pomegranates was not entirely due to the beautiful lesson in courtesy given me by William. Brussels sprouts, cherries, English gooseberries -they were my mother’s; they recurred in her talk as often as ‘a real London pea-souper’, or ‘chestnuts by the fire’, or ‘cherry blossom at Kew’. I no longer grudged these to her; I listened and was careful not to show that my thoughts were on my own inheritance of veld and sun. But pomegranates were an exotic for my mother; and therefore more easily shared with her. She had been in Persia, where, one understood, pomegranate juice ran in rivers. The wife of a minor official, she had lived in a vast stone house cooled by water trickling down a thousand stone channels from the mountains, she had lived among roses and jasmine, walnut trees and pomegranates. But, unfortunately, for too short a time.

Why not pomegranates here, in Africa? Why not?

The four trees had been planted at the same time as the first vegetable beds; and almost at once two of them died. A third lingered on for a couple of seasons and then succumbed to the white ants. The fourth stood lonely among the Cape gooseberry bushes, bore no fruit, and at last was forgotten.

Then one day my mother was showing Mrs MacGregor her chickens and as they returned through tangles of grass and weed, their skirts lifted high in both hands, my mother exclaimed: ‘Why, I do believe the pomegranate is fruiting at last. Look, look, it is!’ She called to us, the children, and we went running, and stood around a small thorny tree, and looked at a rusty-red fruit the size of a child’s fist. ‘It’s ripe,’ said my mother, and pulled it off.

Inside the house we were each given a dozen seeds on saucers. They were bitter, but we did not like to ask for sugar. Mrs MacGregor said gently: ‘It’s wonderful. How you must miss all that!’

‘The roses!’ said my mother. ‘And sacks of walnuts … and we used to drink pomegranate juice with the melted snow water … nothing here tastes like that. The soil is no good.’

I looked at William, sitting opposite me. He turned his head and smiled. I fell in love.

He was then fifteen, home for the holidays. He was a silent boy, thoughtful; and the quietness in his deep grey eyes seemed to me like a promise of warmth and understanding I had never known. There was a tightness in my chest, because it hurt to be shut out from the world of simple kindness he lived in. I sat there, opposite him, and said to myself that I had known him all my life and yet until this moment had never understood what he was. I looked at those extraordinarily clear eyes, that were like water over grey pebbles, I gazed and gazed, until he gave me a slow direct look which showed he knew I had been staring. It was like a warning, as if a door had been shut.

After the MacGregors had gone, I went through the bushes to the pomegranate tree. It was about my height, a tough, obstinate-looking thing; and there was a round yellow ball the size of a walnut hanging from a twig.

I looked at the ugly little tree and thought Pomegranates! Breasts like pomegranates and a belly like a heap of wheat! The golden pomegranates of the sun, I thought … pomegranates like the red of blood.

I was in a fever, more than a little mad. The space of thick grass and gooseberry bushes between the trees was haunted by William, and his deep grey eyes looked at me across the pomegranate tree.

Next day I sat under the tree. It gave no shade, but the acrid sunlight was barred and splotched under it. There was hard cracked red earth beneath a covering of silvery dead grass. Under the grass I saw grains of red, and half a hard brown shell. It seemed that a fruit had ripened and burst without our knowing – yes, everywhere in the soft old grass lay the tiny crimson seeds. I tasted one; warm sweet juice flooded my tongue. I gathered them up and ate them until my mouth was full of dry seeds. I spat them out and thought that a score of pomegranate trees would grow from that mouthful.

As I watched, tiny black ants came scurrying along the roots of the grass, scrambling over the fissures in the earch, to snatch away the seeds. I lay on my elbow and watched. A dozen of them were levering at a still unbroken seed. Suddenly the frail tissue split as they bumped it over a splinter, and they were caught in a sticky red ooze.

The ants would carry these seeds for hundreds of yards; there would be an orchard of pomegranates. William MacGregor would come visiting with his parents, and find me among the pomegranate trees; I could hear the sound of his grave voice, mingled with the tinkle of camel bells and the splashing of falling water.

I went to the tree every day and lay under it, watching the single yellow fruit ripening on its twig. There would come a moment when it must burst and scatter crimson seeds; I must be there when it did; it seemed as if my whole life was concentrated, and ripening with that single fruit.

It was very hot under the tree. My head ached. My flesh was painful with the sun. Yet there I sat all day, watching the tiny ants at their work, letting them run over my legs, waiting for the pomegranate fruit to ripen. It swelled slowly; it seemed set on reaching perfection, for when it was the size that the other had been picked, it was still a bronzing yellow, and the rind was soft. It was going to be a big fruit, the size of both my fists.

Then something terrifying happened. One day I saw that the twig it hung from was splitting off the branch. The wizened, dry little tree could not sustain the weight of the fruit it had produced. I went to the house, brought down bandages from the medicine chest, and strapped the twig firm and tight to the branch, in such a way that the weight was supported. Then I wet the bandage, tenderly, and thought of William, William, William. I wet the bandage daily, and thought of him.

What I thought of William had become a world, stronger than anything around me. Yet, since I was mad, so weak, it vanished at a touch. Once, for instance, I saw him driving with his father on the wagon along the road to the station. I remember I was ashamed that that marvellous feverish world should depend on a half-grown boy in dusty khaki, gripping a piece of grass between his teeth as he stared ahead of him. It came to this – that in order to preserve the dream, I must not see William. And it seemed he felt something of the sort himself, for in all those weeks he never came near me, whereas once he used to come every day. And yet I was convinced it must happen that William and the moment when the pomegranate split open would coincide.

I imagined it in a thousand ways, as the fruit continued to grow. Now, it was a clear bronze yellow with faint rust-coloured streaks. The rind was thin, so soft that the swelling seeds within were shaping it. The fruit looked lumpy and veined, like a nursing breast. The small crown where the stem fastened on it, which had been the sheath of the flower, was still green. It began to harden and turn back into iron-grey thorns.

Soon, soon, it would be ripe. Very swiftly, the skin lost its smooth thinness. It took on a tough pored look, like the skin of an old weatherbeaten countryman. It was a ruddy scarlet now, and hot to the touch. A small crack appeared, which in a day had widened so that the packed red seeds within were visible, almost bursting out. I did not dare leave the tree. I was there from six in the morning until the sun went down. I even crept down with the candle at night, although I argued it could not burst at night, not in the cool of the night, it must be the final unbearable thrust of the hot sun which would break it.

For three days nothing happened. The crack remained the same. Ants swarmed up the trunk, along the branches and into the fruit. The scar oozed red juice in which black ants swam and struggled. At any moment it might happen. And William did not come. I was sure he would: I watched the empty road helplessly, watching for him to come striding along, a piece of grass between his teeth, to me and the pomegranate tree. Yet he did not. In one night, the crack split another half-inch, I saw a red seed push itself out of the crack and fall. Instantly it was borne off by the ants into the grass.

I went up to the house and asked my mother when the MacGregors were coming to tea.

‘I don’t know, dear. Why?’

‘Because. I just thought …’

She looked at me. Her eyes were critical. In one moment, she would say the name William. I struck first. To have William and the moment together, I must pay fee to the family gods. ‘There’s a pomegranate nearly ripe, and you know how interested Mrs MacGregor is …’

She looked sharply at me. ‘Pick it, and we’ll make a drink of it.’

‘Oh no, it’s not quite ready. Not altogether …’

‘Silly child,’ she said at last. She went to the telephone and said: ‘Mrs MacGregor, this daughter of mine, she’s got it into her head – you know how children are.’

I did not care. At four that afternoon I was waiting by the pomegranate tree. Their car came thrusting up the steep road to the crown of the hill. There was Mr MacGregor in his khaki, Mrs MacGregor in her best afternoon dress – and William. The adults shook hands, kissed. William did not turn round and look at me. It was not possible, it was monstrous, that the force of my dream should not have had the power to touch him at all, that he knew nothing of what he must do.

Then he slowly turned his head and looked down the slope to where I stood. He did not smile. It seemed he had not seen me, for his eyes travelled past me, and back to the grownups. He stood to one side while they exchanged their news and greetings; and then all four laughed, and turned to look at me and my tree. It seemed for a moment they were all coming. At once, however, they went into the house, William trailing after them, frowning.

In a moment he would have gone in; the space in front of the old house would be empty. I called ‘William!’ I had not known I would call. My voice sounded small in the wide afternoon sunlight.

He went on as if he had not heard. Then he stopped, seemed to think, and came down the hill towards me while I anxiously examined his face. The low tangle of the gooseberry bushes was around his legs, and he swore sharply.

‘Look at the pomegranate,’ I said. He came to a halt beside the tree, and looked. I was searching those clear grey eyes now for a trace of that indulgence they had shown my mother over the brussels sprouts, over that first unripe pomegranate.

Now all I wanted was indulgence; I abandoned everything else.

‘It’s full of ants,’ he said at last.

‘Only a little, only where it’s cracked.’

He stood, frowning, chewing at his piece of grass. His lips were full and thick-skinned; and I could see the blood, dull and dark around the pale groove where the grass-stem pressed.

The pomegranate hung there, swarming with ants.

Now, I thought wildly. Now – crack now.

There was not a sound. The sun pouring down, hot and yellow, drawing up the smell of the grasses. There was, too, a faint sour smell from the fermenting juice of the pomegranate.

‘It’s bad,’ said William, in that uncomfortable, angry voice. ‘And what’s that bit of dirty rag for?’

‘It was breaking, the twig was breaking off – I tied it up.’

‘Mad,’ he remarked, aside, to the afternoon. ‘Quite mad,’ He was looking about him in the grass. He reached down and picked up a stick.

‘No,’ I cried out, as he hit at the tree. The pomegranate flew into the air and exploded in a scatter of crimson seeds, fermenting juice and black ants.

The cracked empty skin, with its white clean-looking inner skin faintly stained with juice, lay in two fragments at my feet.

He was poking sulkily with the stick at the little scarlet seeds that lay everywhere on the earth.

Then he did look at me. Those clear eyes were grave again, thoughtful, and judging. They held that warning I had seen in them before.

‘That’s your pomegranate,’ he said at last.

‘Yes.’ I said.

He smiled. ‘We’d better go up, if we want any tea.’ We went together up the hill to the house, and as we entered the room where the grown-ups sat over the teacups, I spoke quickly, before he could. In a bright careless voice I said: ‘It was bad, after all, the ants had got at it. It should have been picked before.’

Getting off the Altitude

That night of the dance, years later, when I saw Mrs Slatter come into the bedroom at midnight, not seeing me because the circle of lamplight was focused low, with a cold and terrible face I never would have believed could be hers after knowing her so long during the day-times and the visits -that night, when she had dragged herself out of the room again, still not knowing I was there, I went to the mirror to see my own face. I held the lamp as close as I could and looked into my face. For I had not known before that a person’s face could be smooth and comfortable, though often sorrowful, like Molly Slatter’s had been all those years, and then hard-set, in the solitude away from the dance and the people (that night they had drunk a great deal and the voices of the singing reminded me of when dogs howl at the full moon), into an old and patient stone. Yes, her face looked like white stone that the rain has trickled over and worn through the wet seasons.

My face, that night in the mirror, dusted yellow from the lamplight, with the dark watery spaces of the glass behind, was smooth and enquiring, with the pert flattered look of a girl in her first long dress and dancing with the young people for the first time. There was nothing in it, a girl’s face, empty. Yet I had been crying just before, and I wished then I could go away into the dark and stay there for ever. Yet Molly Slatter’s terrible face was familiar to me, as if it were her own face, her real one. I seemed to know it. And that meant that the years I had known her comfortable and warm in spite of all her troubles had been saying something else to me about her. But only now I was prepared to listen.

I left the mirror, set the lamp down on the dressing-table, and went out into the passage and looked for her among the people, and there she was in her red satin dress looking just as usual, talking to my father, her hand on the back of his chair, smiling down at him.

‘It hasn’t been a bad season, Mr Farquar,’ she was saying, ‘the rains haven’t done us badly at all.’

Driving home in the car that night, my mother asked: ‘What was Molly saying to you?’

And my father said: ‘Oh I don’t know, I really don’t know.’ His voice was sad and angry.

She said: ‘That dress of hers. Her evening dresses look like a cheap night-club.’

He said, troubled and sorrowful, ‘Yes. Actually I said something to her.’

‘Somebody should.’

‘No,’ he said, quick against the cold criticizing voice. ‘No. It’s a – pretty colour. But I said to her, There’s not much to that dress, is there?’

‘What did she say?’

‘She was hurt. I was sorry I said anything.’

‘H’mm,’ said my mother, with a little laugh.

He turned his head from his driving, so that the car lights swung wild over the rutted track for a moment, and said direct at her: ‘She’s a good woman. She’s a nice woman.’

But she gave another offended gulp of laughter. As a woman insists in an argument because she won’t give in, even when she knows she is wrong.

As for me, I saw that dress again, with its criss-cross of narrow sweat-darkened straps over the ageing white back, and I saw Mrs Slatter’s face when my father criticized her. I might have been there, I saw it so clearly. She coloured, lifted her head, lower her lids so that the tears would not show, and she said: ‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Mr Farquar.’ It was with dignity. Yes. She had put on that dress in order to say something. But my father did not approve. He had said so.

She cared what my father said. They cared very much for each other. She called him Mr Farquar always, and he called her Molly; and when the Slatters came over to tea, and Mr Slatter was being brutal, there was a gentleness and a respect for her in my father’s manner which made even Mr Slatter feel it and even, sometimes, repeat something he had said to his wife in a lower voice, although it was still impatient.

The first time I knew my father felt for Molly Slatter and that my mother grudged it to her was when I was perhaps seven or eight. Their house was six miles away over the veld, but ten by the road. Their house like ours was on a ridge. At the end of the dry season when the trees were low and the leaves thinning, we could see their lights flash out at sundown, low and yellow across the miles of country. My father, after coming back from seeing Mr Slatter about some farm matter, stood by our window looking at their lights, and my mother watched him. Then he said: ‘Perhaps she should stand up to him? No, that’s not it. She does, in her way. But Lord, he’s a tough customer, Slatter.’

My mother said, her head low over her sewing: ‘She married him.’

He let his eyes swing around at her, startled. Then he laughed. ‘That’s right, she married him.’

‘Well?’

‘Oh come off it, old girl,’ he said almost gay, laughing and hard. Then, still laughing angrily he went over and kissed her on the cheek.

‘I like Molly,’ she said, defensive. ‘I like her. She hasn’t got what you might call conversation but I like her.’

‘Living with Slatter, I daresay she’s got used to keeping her mouth shut.’

When Molly Slatter came over to spend the day with my mother the two women talked eagerly for hours about household things. Then, when my father came in for tea or dinner, there was a lock of sympathies and my mother looked ironical while he went to sit by Mrs Slatter, even if only for a minute, saying: ‘Well, Molly? Everything all right with you?’

‘I’m very well, thank you, Mr Farquar, and so are the children.’

Most people were frightened of Mr Slatter. There were four Slatter boys, and when the old man was in a temper and waving the whip he always had with him, they ran off into the bush and stayed there until he had cooled down. All the natives on their farm were afraid of him. Once when he knew their houseboy had stolen some soap he tied him to a tree in the garden without food and water all of one day, and then through the night, and beat him with his whip every time he went past, until the boy confessed. And once, when he had hit a farm-boy, and the boy complained to the police, Mr Slatter tied the boy to his horse and rode it at a gallop to the police station twelve miles off and made the boy run beside, and told him if he complained to the police again he would kill him. Then he paid the ten-shilling fine and made the boy run beside the horse all the way back again.

I was so frightened of him that I could feel myself begin trembling when I saw his car turning to come up the drive from the farm lands.

He was a square fair man, with small sandy-lashed blue eyes, and small puffed cracked lips, and red ugly hands. He used to come up the wide red shining steps of the veranda, grinning slightly, looking at us. Then he would take a handful of tow-hair from the heads of whichever of his sons were nearest, one in each fist, and tighten his fists slowly, not saying a word, while they stood grinning back and their eyes filled slowly. He would grin over their heads at Molly Slatter, while she sat silent, saying nothing. Then, one or other of the boys would let out a sound of pain, and Mr Slatter showed his small discoloured teeth in a grin of triumphant good humour and let them go. Then he stamped off in his big farm boots into the house.

Mrs Slatter would say to her sons: ‘Don’t cry. Your father doesn’t know his own strength. Don’t cry.’ And she went on sewing, composed and pale.

Once at the station, the Slatter car and ours were drawn up side by side outside the store. Mrs Slatter was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver’s seat. In our car my father drove and my mother was beside him. We children were in the back seats. Mr Slatter came out of the bar with Mrs Pritt and stood on the store veranda talking to her. He stood before her, legs apart, in his way of standing, head back on his shoulders, eyes narrowed, grinning, red fists loose at his sides, and talked on for something like half an hour. Meanwhile Mrs Pritt let her weight slump on to one hip and lolled in front of him. She wore a tight shrill green dress, so short it showed the balls of her thin knees.

And my father leaned out of our car window though we had all our stores in and might very well leave for home now, and talked steadily and gently to Mrs Slatter, who was quiet, not looking at her husband, but making conversation with my father and across him to my mother. And so they went on talking until Mr Slatter left Mrs Pritt, and slammed himself into the driver’s seat and started the car.

I did not like Mrs Pritt and I knew neither of my parents did. She was a thin wiry tall woman with black short jumpy hair. She had a sharp knowing face and a sudden laugh like the scream of a hen caught by the leg. Her voice was always loud, and she laughed a great deal.

But seeing Mr Slatter with her was enough to know that they fitted. She was not gentle and kindly like Mrs Slatter. She was as tough in her own way as Mr Slatter. And long before I ever heard it said I knew well enough that, as my mother said primly, they liked each other. I asked her, meaning her to tell the truth, Why does Mr Slatter always go over when Mr Pritt is away, and she said: I expect Mr Slatter likes her.

In our district, with thirty or forty families on the farms spread over a hundred square miles or so, nothing happened privately. That day at the station I must have been ten years old, eleven, but it was not the first or the last time I heard the talk between my parents:

My father: ‘I daresay it could make things easier for Molly.’

She, then: ‘Do you?’

‘But if he’s got to have an affair, he might at least not push it down our throats, for Molly’s sake.’

And she: ‘Does he have to have an affair?’

She said the word, affair, with difficulty. It was not her language. Nor, and that was what she was protesting against, my father’s. For they were both conventional and religious people. Yet at moments of crisis, at moments of scandal and irregularity, my father spoke this other language, cool and detached, as if he were born to it.

‘A man like Slatter,’ he said thoughtfully, as if talking to another man, ‘it’s obvious. And Emmy Pritt. Yes. Obviously, obviously! But it depends on how Molly takes it. Because if she doesn’t take it the right way, she could make it hell for herself.’

‘Take it the right way,’ said my mother, with bright protesting eyes, and my father did not answer.

I used to stay with Mrs Slatter sometimes in the holidays. I went across-country over the kaffir paths, walking or on my bicycle, with some clothes in a small suitcase.

The boys were, from having to stand up to Mr Slatter, tough and indifferent boys, and went about the farm in a closed gang. They did man’s work, driving tractors and superintending the gangs of boys before they were in their ‘teens. I stayed with Mrs Slatter. She cooked a good deal, and sewed and gardened. Most of the day she sat on the veranda sewing. We did not talk much. She used to make her own dresses, cotton prints and pastel linens, like all the women of the district wore. She made Mr Slatter’s khaki farm shirts and the boys’ shirts. Once she made herself a petticoat that was too small for her to get into, and Mr Slatter saw her struggling with it in front of the mirror, and he said: ‘What size do you think you are, Bluebell?’ in the same way he would say, as we sat down to table, ‘What have you been doing with your lily-white hands today, Primrose?’ To which she would reply, pleasantly, as if he had really asked a question: ‘I’ve made some cakes.’ Or: ‘I got some salt meat from the butcher at the station today fresh out of the pickle.’ About the petticoat she said, ‘Yes, I must have been putting on more weight than I knew.’

When I was twelve or thereabouts, I noticed that the boys had turned against their mother, not in the way of being brutal to her, but they spoke to her as their father did, calling her Bluebell, or the Fat Woman at the Fair. It was odd to hear them, because it was as if they said simply, Mum, or Mother. Not once did I hear her lose her temper with them. I could see she had determined to herself not to make them any part of what she had against Mr Slatter. I knew she was pleased to have me there, during that time, with the five men coming in only for meals.