A Blade of Grass (3 page)

“Well, my father wasn’t going to let him go, not just yet. First he sent me to get the can of paint that we had set aside, a can of whitewash, the same thing you use to whitewash the walls. We couldn’t use brushes on that baboon in the trap, he was much too angry, and you know they have teeth that can rip your arm to the bone. No, we just threw the paint over him. When he was covered in white paint we opened the trap and stood back.

“He was out of there like a shot, charging across the veldt to his friends. As soon as they saw him they all fell silent. And then they started to run. The closer he got, the faster they ran. And he was screaming at them to
wait for him, but they just ran from this strange white baboon. They’d never seen anything like it before, so they ran away.

“We heard him up there in the hills, screaming for them to come back, and his voice growing fainter, but those other baboons didn’t want anything to do with him. I believe they thought he was a ghost. A white baboon ghost.”

These are stories meant to tease her, to frighten her the way one frightens a child, to make her admire the brave farmers.

Once, in the deep hours of the night, soon after she had come to the farm, Märit sat up in bed awakened by the whining howl of a hyena, half laughter, half mad keening. She wanted to reach out to shake Ben awake too, and tell him that a wild animal was on the farm, but the howl of the hyena, the madness and lust in the eerie laughter, held her transfixed where she sat clutching the pillow, listening to a sound that seemed to come from inside her own throat. Her neighbors, the farmers, have no sentimental notions about the animals. They are practical men and women, intent on growing their crops, on taming the wild, on being successful farmers. There are guns to keep the animals away. Their guns are a solution. And the animals are hidden now, in the wild country.

Märit walks on, into the silence, where the shadow of the koppie that is called Devil’s Head throws a long shape across the ground at her feet. With the farm behind her and the wild country all around she feels like a trespasser, with a trespasser’s sense of apprehension—as if this land is not hers, as if she has no right to be here.

But is this land not hers to walk? She owns it, does she not? Her money and Ben’s has paid for her right to walk here. It is hers to walk.

She stops and looks back the way she has come. There is nobody in sight. There is always someone when she walks, always someone busy with some task, and if she stops to watch she feels herself an interloper. There is always someone there, wherever you go, in the whole country. So many strangers. They are always watching you, gauging your purpose, your intent towards them. And they are wary of you, not unfriendly, but always deferential, unforthcoming. Because to be in their presence means you want something—information, labor, identification
papers. Her attempts at small talk are always awkward, unsuccessful, making the workers nervous as they apprehend her own nervousness. Conversation ceases when she appears, and only resumes with nervous laughter when she has gone on her way. She never knows what to say. Ben can talk to them—he can talk about work, about the farm—and he can work with them so that they accept him, if not as one of them, at least as a man. He has an easy rapport, and speaks their language, albeit imperfectly, but they laugh good-naturedly at his mistakes and his jokes. But she cannot talk to them. Nor does she ever visit the kraal, where the women are. It is too intimate there, too different from the way she herself lives. Their lives are hidden. And she is hidden from them.

She has never really known one of them as a friend, only as a servant.

They are not natural in her presence. Because of the differences. Because the color of their skin is different from hers. Everything is based on that distinction. She brings a discord into their lives. She is always a stranger. Color is the marker—here on this farm, in this country, across this whole continent.

Only in the house is she at home, between the walls. Only there. She might own the farm and all the land, but only in the farmhouse is she at home. Sometimes not even there.

The realization comes to Märit that she fears them. She is uneasy in their presence, because they are so many. In the city you don’t notice it so much, but out here it is she who is different, she who is the stranger.

And do they fear her? They give her respect and deference, and they probably fear her too. Because she owns the land, because she can do what she likes, even order them off the land, take away their homes if it came to that. She can burn the crops or let them rot in the fields. She can sell or not sell. She has authority over their residence permits and their livelihood. She can come and go. They cannot.

But even so, even so.

Märit clambers over some rocks at the base of the koppie, and comes upon what looks like a little garden. Someone has closed off a piece of the land, here in this barren place, and tilled the soil and built a barrier of rocks and thorn scrub. Even here, she thinks, is the attempt to fence off, to
enclose, to possess. But the effort is pathetic, like some child’s attempt to mimic a garden.

She bends down to touch the soil and a small green lizard darts away into a crevice. Märit recoils. Even here some creature watches you, and waits for you to leave. The clods of dark soil crumble and trickle through her fingers. And who owns this? she asks herself. Me? Ben? The child who built this garden? The lizard that watches from the shadowed crevice? Or none of us?

S
HE WALKS ON AWAY
from the koppie, into the long yellow grass, and the coarse texture of the grass brushes across her bare legs. She stops, looking down at her pale skin, wary of snakes, because she is only wearing sandals that leave her ankles and calves exposed. Always something to fear, to watch out for.

The terror of snakes has haunted her from childhood, ever since that time when her father took her to the Snake Park in Durban. Until then, Märit had never seen a snake up close, but she had an instinctive revulsion to them. When her father asked Märit and her mother that day if they wanted to go to the Snake Park, her mother shook her head adamantly and said, “I won’t be going near any snakes, thank you very much.”

“And you, Märit?” her father asked.

“Yes, I’ll come, Daddy,” she said. Even though she was afraid. But she wanted to show her father that she trusted him, that she was brave.

Märit remembers the name of the place, the FitzSimons Snake Park, on Lower Marine Parade, the long road that runs along the beach, and how when she got out of the car, her hands were damp and her armpits wet from the humidity and from her nervousness. She could smell the sea air and hear the booming of the waves on the beach not far off. She remembers that she asked her father as they stood in the parking lot, “Maybe we should go to the beach instead and collect some shells for Mommy?”

Her father raised his eyebrows at her, and she said quickly, “After we look at the snakes.” She wanted to please him, to be brave for him.

The Snake Park was more like a zoo, with tortoises, a wire enclosure where bats hung in a tree, a pool where an old crocodile floated in the
murky water. There were no snakes. Then Märit’s father said to her, “Come, we can go and see them milking a snake.”

“Milking?” She imagined a snake with teats, like a sow, with a row of nipples along its underside.

“It’s just an expression. They take the venom from the snake and use it to make a serum, so that if you get bitten, they can inject some serum into your blood and you won’t die.”

Her father took her hand and led her to an enclosure, a patch of grass surrounded by a narrow ditch of water, where two men stood on either side of a large wooden box. One of the men had in his hand a long pole with a sort of clamp on the end. His assistant opened the box and the man reached in with the pole. After a moment he withdrew the pole and a long black wriggling snake was held in the clamp.

“That’s a mamba,” her father whispered. “Very poisonous.”

What if it gets loose? she thought. “Snakes can swim, can’t they?” she whispered. What if it got loose and came towards the crowd and swam across the moat?

Now the man holding the pole handed it over to his assistant. He drew a small glass jar from his pocket and moved towards the wriggling snake held in the clamp on the end of the pole.

“He’s going to put the jar by the snake’s mouth and make it bite,” her father said. “The venom will go into the jar.”

The man reached out and grasped the snake behind the head, and the assistant released the clamp. The long writhing black body coiled back and forth. Märit thought she could hear an angry hissing noise, like air escaping from a punctured tire. The fangs were exposed, protruding from the snake’s mouth, and they fastened onto the lip of the glass jar.

But then something went wrong. A sudden coiling, whipping motion from the snake, and the man lost his grasp on the jar, which fell to the grass. Märit saw the fangs sink into the man’s hand, into the fleshy part just behind the thumb.

He screamed in pain and flailed his hand in the air, with the long black snake hanging there, fangs embedded in his flesh.

Märit screamed too, then pulled away from her father and ran. She ran along a graveled path, not wanting to be trapped in this place, with the
snake loose, and she imagined the snake loose now, swimming across the ditch, into the crowd, coming for her. There was a small building just ahead, and she dashed for it. She would be safe inside and there would be someone to help her, someone to catch and kill the snake.

She blundered into a room with a dimly lit interior. There was a faint animal smell in the air. A movement flickered ahead and Märit jerked back, turning to flee. Her motion brought her full tilt into a thick sheet of glass. The impact stunned her, exploding her vision in a flash of bursting light. As she put her hand to her forehead, rubbing the bump that was already forming, she saw the snake.

Behind the glass, in the dim room with its murky yellow light, a cobra had reared up, the whole upper body swaying back and forth, the wide hooded head swollen out like a fan. And at the top of the engorged hood the small reptilian face was watching her with black eyes that were almost on a level with hers.

Märit could not move—her body trembled but she could not move. The sinuous body of the snake swayed slowly from side to side, and she followed it with her eyes, and the other black eyes held hers. The swaying stopped abruptly, the hood seemed to enlarge, to become even more engorged; the mouth opened wide, revealing the pink interior and the stretched muscles of the jaws and the yellow fangs. In a motion that was too fast for her to register, the snake struck.

The reptilian head banged against the glass, once, twice, towards her face, and from the pink mouth a whitish liquid spurted out onto the glass window. The swaying head of the snake shuddered, and it reared and spat again, the thick liquid spattering onto the glass.

Märit screamed and screamed. She was screaming when her father found her, and she was still screaming when he lifted her in his arms and hurried out to the car with her.

She remembers the long walk on the beach afterwards, her father carrying her in his arms, and the cool salty wind off the ocean, and an ice-cream cone, and then a bottle of cream soda that she held in both hands so long that the liquid lost its fizz and chill until it had the flavour of warm syrup.

But afterwards, for a long time afterwards, her parents had to check her bedroom before she would enter the room to sleep, and she would make
sure her father looked under the bed and beneath the pillow and behind the dresser before she would go to bed.

Even now Märit does not like to go barefoot, even in the house, especially at night, and she is always wary when she walks in the long grass.

M
ÄRIT ARRIVES
at a fence, the barbed wire that marks the border of the farm, the limits of what she owns, the territory where she may walk without being a stranger. A fence to keep others out, and to keep her in. A frontier. She paces along the fence, glancing through the strands of wire to the other side. If she crosses and continues walking, how long before she reaches another country, the real frontier, where there are rumors of war? She will not be welcome there. If she crosses that country and goes to the next she will not be welcome there. Or in the country beyond that. In all the miles and acres of the whole continent it is only here, on this side of the fence, behind the wire, that she belongs.

Märit searches on the ground for a sturdy stick, then uses it to separate two strands of wire, the way she has seen Ben do, making a space wide enough for her to step through. Her thick chestnut hair falls across her face and she pauses a moment to gather it back, fastening the tresses into a rough bun with an elastic from her pocket.

The trees are the same here, the soil, the sky, the air all the same as on the other side of the wire. But she is different. A trespasser. She walks farther in, until the fence is no longer in sight. When she reaches a conical mound of dried mud, a termite mound in the shade, she sits down and removes her cardigan, glad to feel the air on her bare arms. Silence closes in on her. But then she picks out the sounds of birds, the chattering of finches, the soft call of a dove, then the flash of tawny brown and white as a hoopoe sails through the branches of an acacia, a wriggling grub in its long beak.

In this unknown country, this wild place, she is nobody, she is
unknown. She is not Märit, not Mevrou Laurens, not the farmer’s wife, not the new bride, not the girl who lost her parents, not the Missus, not the one who walks and is watched. Here there is nobody to see her. She is nobody. Here is a place to forget and be forgotten.

She sees the shrubs and trees and the long grass, but her mind takes no notice of what is there as her consciousness drifts into a state of half awareness, as she forgets herself and her trespasses. Her eyelids droop like those of a cat, the world dissolves in a haze of light. She is free of the burden of her self. She is alone. She is nobody.

Time has no substance when she lapses into these states. Time stops, becomes nonexistent, as if she steps out of the flow. She is aware, but her usual consciousness is suspended. It is not a state that could be characterized as happiness, yet she is happy, after a fashion.

A rustle sounds in the trees nearby, the movement of leaves, the sharp snap of a twig breaking—the motion of another presence on the earth. Märit rises quickly to her feet. She hears the careful tread of footsteps, stealthy, then silence. The birds have ceased their chattering.

All the fear rushes back, all the awareness. She is not alone, she is watched. Her eyes move across the screen of brush, peering into the dappled green and brown. Nothing. Nobody. Her heart flutters rapidly in her chest.

Nobody, yet she is watched. She feels it in the silence and the suspension that fills the air. Her ears strain to catch the slightest sound, the slightest movement. And it comes again, the furtive footsteps.

“Who is it?” she calls.

The movement stops. She feels herself watched, seen by the unseen.

She decides to run. All her muscles tense for flight.

In that moment as she poises to flee, a face peers at her from among the leaves. Dark eyes meet hers and hold her transfixed.

The footsteps shuffle again and the face pushes forward through the leaves. A long muzzle, a white chevron down the bridge of the nose, large almond-shaped eyes.

The animal steps into the clearing. A kudu, jaws slowly chewing, shell-like ears swiveled in her direction, brown eyes focused upon Märit. A long sigh of relief shudders through her chest as she breathes again.

The fear drains from Märit, flowing away like water, and she is left trembling and grateful. Only a buck, only an animal. Only a kudu, studying her with cow-like eyes. The antelope steps into the clearing delicately, dainty for an animal of that size, for it is almost as big as a horse. Above the mild brown eyes, and the shell-like ears turned in her direction, are corkscrew horns, heraldic, regal, like a royal headdress. On the tan hide, thin white vertical stripes are like further emblems of royalty. A bearded fringe dangles below the animal’s chin, brushing its neck.

Recovering from her fright, Märit is left grateful and trembling, seized for a moment with an almost overwhelming desire to embrace the kudu. Could it be the very same kudu she saw that first day she came to the farm with Ben, when they disturbed one as it was drinking at the river? Kudufontein, the name of this farm, given for the presence of this animal.

Märit remembers a picture she saw as a girl, in a book of paintings, of a walled garden and a lady in white kneeling before a white unicorn that had the same expression on its face as this kudu. The desire to embrace the animal, to touch it, comes upon her again.

Märit feels herself in the presence of some wise and beneficent dignitary, a creature from mythology, something priestly and good. And in this presence she feels herself also to be good and wise and without malice or harm. Slowly she lowers herself to her knees and folds her hands before her chest, in a gesture of prayer, of worship. The kudu dips its head and looks at her, wide black nostrils flaring slightly to take in her scent. She smells the kudu’s breath, a scent of warm grass.

She looks up into the creature’s eyes and sees no guile, no malice, no fear, only the kudu’s knowledge of itself. She sees its soul. And her own soul is tarnished and flawed in comparison, compromised in some manner that she fears will never be purified.

Gently she reaches up to touch the bearded fringe, to stroke the chevron of white across the nose, to be taken up onto that strong back.

She is emptied of doubt, of trespass, of fear.

“I am Märit,” she whispers.

The kudu ceases chewing for a moment, then emits a soft pant, like an answer, and again she smells the warm scent of grass, the very breath of the animal.

She stretches her hand forward, wanting just one touch, and she feels the warm breath on the tips of her extended fingers. Then the kudu steps back, and the regal head reaches up, and the wide shell-like ears swivel away. It turns without looking at her and moves back into the trees, unconcerned.

The soft thud of the footsteps fades and the rustling of the leaves fades, and the silence returns.

The tears that come to her eyes are hot and bitter, and filled with great sadness. Some great opportunity has passed. As if the hope of grace has been offered, then withdrawn from her forever. She remains kneeling on the ground, head bowed, hands clasped.

Eventually, Märit rises to her feet, a supplicant whose prayers have remained unacknowledged, and she is chastened and disappointed. She rises and brushes away the dust from her knees and turns again to the way she has come, to the farm, to the fence, to the house where she must live.

As she walks slowly back to the house Märit recalls a story she once was told of a traveler who lived amongst the Bushmen of the desert, those nomadic wanderers who slept under the stars and carried nothing and left nothing behind, moving with the winds of the seasons. The traveler asked them one day, How is it that you never become lost? They had no maps and there were no roads, no signposts, yet the Bushmen moved unerringly to where there was water, and food, moving like the breezes of the desert.

They laughed at the question, for it was strange to them. How can we become lost, they said. The birds know us, the animals know us, the wind knows us. At night the stars see us and they know where we are. So then, how can we become lost?

But nobody knows me, Märit thinks. And I am lost.