A triptych

[Bokkeveld, South Africa, 1747]

1

They had been sent out to dig for uintjies. There was only one iron rod, the other missing when she had gone to fetch them from behind the door. She took the rod for herself, told the slave boy Job he would have to use his hands. But the earth was hard and full of stones. It was not possible to dig deep enough, and he slapped the ground in frustration, saying it wasn’t fair, that they had to share, they had to take it in turns. Even when she found him a thin, crooked branch that he could use, he continued to complain, tapping the stones with it, saying, “It doesn’t work, look here, it doesn’t do anything. You have to share.” But she wasn’t going to do that. The rod was hers. Slaves were built for hard work, that’s what her father said, and they were lazy, you had to watch them, because if they got in the habit of laziness then it was difficult to get them out of it. Job would have to learn that; he had to work.

Around them the Skurweberge stretched, rough with boulders, each sharp and jagged, an endless grey hostility, everything in view harsh and threatening. No movement in all that barrenness, just herself and Job, scrambling over the rocks, looking for the small patches between them where once there had been a bit of green, and where now there remained only the coarse orange sand.

Job called to her, pointing to where a black scorpion was crossing a rock. She reached out, tried to stab at it with the rod, but it was too fast and she hit the rock instead, the sound of iron on stone loud around them, sending a jolt up her arm.

“It’s my turn now,” he said, grabbing hold of the rod. But she was bigger than him, easily pushing him down, knocking him against the rock, so that he cried out, and she asked if he was alright. Again, he reached for the rod, trying to jerk it out of her hands. “Give it to me.”

Suddenly a shot rang out across the jagged boulders, echoing off them, rolling back, as sharp as the rocks themselves. Both of them looked up, Job letting go of the rod, stumbling back a little, then righting himself. They looked in the direction of the house, waiting to see if there was going to be another. When none came, she said, “Lion.” Job said, “Hyena. It has to be a hyena.” She held the rod up in front of her like a sword, began running home. Job came after, holding his stick in the same way.

In the yard, her mother was outside the mud and thatch house, walking to and from the door, her hand on her belly, saying, “I can’t get in, I can’t get in, Lord help me.”

She and Job each tried the door, but there was something blocking it from the inside. It would not move more than an inch. It was a great source of pride for her father, this door, the only wooden door for miles. He had given a stud ram for a half-burnt wagon, taking days for his oxen to drag it up from the valley through the mountain pass, bringing it into the yard with triumph, shouting for them all to come see, come see what he had. They had used the burnt wood for the fire, the rest for making the door, as well as a table, two stools, and a kist. The table was four poles fixed in the dung and peach-pit floor, overlaid with planks. It was uneven, and the creases between the planks always dirty, capturing the roughly-ground flour from the hand mill that Job’s mother, Lijs, had to stand cranking for hours every day, one arm tiring, swapping to the other, swapping again. And later trying to pick the dirt out of the creases with a porcupine quill, but never getting them clean enough. Always something remaining, as though those freckles of white and brown had become part of the wood itself.

She and Job tried the door again, together this time. It would go no further than before. 

“Go fetch Gidean,” her mother said, “go fetch him right now.”

She ran by herself, still holding the iron rod, coming to the field where Job’s father, Gidean, was trying to push a plough through stubbled wheat, calling instructions to the oxen to stay in a straight line. There were dead locusts on the ground, though it had been weeks since they had swarmed. She could feel the crunch of them underfoot, could see them being churned together with the ploughed earth. The devastation was still a surprise to her each time she left the house, going out and seeing nothing where before there had been at least a little. Their small field of wheat, their few hundred sheep, all of them gone now, dead in the previous year’s rains, or raided by local tribes, and the last of them, half-starved by the ruined fields, sold to the meat contractor for next to nothing. 

Gidean saw her coming and called to the oxen to stop, bringing the plough to a halt, fixing it in the earth so that it wouldn’t fall over. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt and waited for her to reach him, looking down at her as she stood catching her breath, his cheeks and forehead patterned with black, raised scars that were so fascinating to her, so ugly and beautiful, these marks of his past life, of his people, of somewhere far away.

“Pa has shut himself inside the house,” she said.

He paused only long enough to unhitch the oxen from the plough, then picked her up, putting her on his back. She could feel other scars through his shirt. Large swollen ones that had grown after her father had whipped him one time and made him bleed. Each year they grew larger, itched and pained, released a foul odour. Riding on his back like this, she could smell them, could feel the throb of them under her, their hot fury. She was careful not to press too tightly against them, holding him loosely round the neck and waist, so that twice he had to shift her up with a shrug of his arms and hips.

Once they reached the yard, he let her drop from him, the smell of the scars still with her, the strange pulsing heat of them against her stomach and chest.

Her mother was pointing at the house, shouting, “The door, the door!”

He tried to ram against it, but still there was something behind it that was keeping it from opening. He called, “Baas, can you hear me?” He put his ear to the door, waited, called again, waited once more. After a minute he moved across to a small square window. There was no glass in it, just a reed mat. He pushed the mat aside, peered in, and called, “Baas, may I come in?” Then, when there was no reply, “Baas, I have to come in.” But his shoulders were too broad and he could not fit through the small gap. He turned around, called for Job to come from where he stood at the far end of the yard with his mother Lijs, her mouth open in  a low wail. Job wouldn’t move from behind her apron, which she was clutching and releasing with both hands. When his father called him again, Job shook his head and Lijs shook her head too.

Her mother still had her hand on her belly, was continuing to pace to and fro. “God in Heaven, God in Heaven, take pity on us, take pity.”

She put her hand on her mother’s arm, gave her the uintjie rod to hold, then went to where Gidean stood and allowed him to lift her up through the window, the mud of the walls rough on her elbows. The action was clumsy, putting her in head first, so that she was reaching out for the floor with her hands, her dress coming over her head, and he still had hold of her ankles, saying, “Don’t look at anything, nonnatjie, just try to open the door.”

The room was dull with smoke and the smell of gunpowder. Hides hung from the rafters, obscuring her view. The house was basic, only two rooms: this front one in which they lived and cooked, and the bedroom. The slaves slept in the barn. In the middle of the front room was a hole for the fire and above it a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, but there was no fire burning now, the only light in the room coming from the hole in the roof and the small window.

“Go to the door, nonnatjie,” Gidean said. “Forget the rest, don’t look at it, just go to the door.”

She could see her father lying on his back, his legs outstretched, feet almost pushing against the wall, his torso twisted to the side, but his head tilted backwards, his mouth and eyes open, so that at first she thought he had turned to look at her, that he was shouting at her for coming back without uintjies because there was nothing else to eat. His face was unusually pale. Always the little startle and joy when he took off his hat, showing his white forehead, the line across his eyebrows where it changed to tan, his cheeks and nose dark with the sun. But there was no joy now, not at this yellow pallor like the kidney fat of sheep.

Between his legs lay his rifle and the missing uintjie rod. His hands were empty, at his sides. He had taken off his shirt. Later they would find it folded and placed on the edge of the buffalo skin bed. In his chest, surrounded by pale curling hairs, a dark hole.

There was sniffing behind her. Job climbing in through the window. He had been lifted in feet first, Gidean’s hands under his armpits, lowering him slowly. He was crying, turned back to the window, trying to hold on to Gidean’s retreating hand. “The door,” she heard Gidean say, and watched as Job stepped carefully across the floor to where the kist had been wedged between the door and one of the posts of the table. He didn’t look in her direction, didn’t look at her father. He tried pushing the kist, grunting at first, then whining, “I can’t. It’s too heavy, it won’t move. I can’t do it.” She watched her father for a while, his shouting mouth, his black wound, waiting for something to change. Nothing did, only Job’s crying getting louder behind her, his wet sniffs. She went to the kist, opened it, began lifting the contents out so that they might try to move it away from the door and let the others in. 

xxx

There was no one else to prepare the body. Lijs was cleaning the blood from the floor in the front room, Gidean had gone out to dig a grave deep enough that the hyenas would not be able to smell the corpse and scratch it out.

She and her mother washed him together. There were only his trousers to remove, raw hide made soft and thin with wear. They were still a little warm when her mother handed them to her, warm and soiled. She didn’t know what to do with them, turned to place them on top of the kist. Someone had returned all the contents to it, had closed the lid, moved it back into place. Her mother said, “No, not there. The fire. We’ll never get them clean.” She took them over to the hole in the ground where Lijs had made a fire, threw the trousers into the flames. The smell of them burning was horrible, sulphurous, and she put a hand over her mouth, using the other to fan the smoke up to the ceiling.

He was thinner than she had expected, his ribs and hipbones sticking out, his nose large between his sunken cheeks. She tried to imagine that thin body pushing the kist by itself, the freckled arms straining, the elbows buckling, and it seemed impossible that he had managed it, and yet he must have done. There was no one who would have helped him.

“I should cut this,” her mother said, fingering the dirty strands of his hair. It was shoulder length, his beard long and bushy. They had no scissors, no razor. She picked up a knife from the kitchen, the one that was used for slaughtering and skinning, always kept sharp, then took clumps of his hair and held them away from his head, slicing into the strands with the knife. She dropped the trimmings onto the floor, said, “Go fetch the water and soap.”

She left her mother to wash his hair, his face, his chest and the gaping hole, the soft privacy below his stomach, and the soiled creases of his buttocks and thighs. For herself, she focused on his arms and legs, taking time over each toe, his flaking heels, the fingers and palms, dark with earth and gunpowder. On the forefinger of his right hand were the purple remains of a swelling. Days he had had it, watching it get bigger and bigger, turning from red to black, eyeing it each night by firelight, unable to sleep, until he could take it no more, cutting into the worst of it, releasing pus and angry blood onto the floor, her mother scolding because of the mess, but he had said nothing, sitting long after everything had come out, still squeezing and squeezing, hoping for more.

2

She had left Job to check the snares by himself, going instead to the pile of stones where her father was buried, standing beside it, trying to imagine what he looked like now after the passing of these months, remembering how Gidean had stumbled when placing him in the hole, her father’s head knocking against the side of the grave, and how Gidean had adjusted his hold on him, lowering him gently the last little way, then positioned him carefully before climbing out and waiting with his head bent for her mother to grab a fistful of earth. But her mother had stopped at the last minute, said quietly, not looking at any of them, “We’ll be needing those.” And Gidean had climbed into the hole again, removing the hides in which her father had been wrapped, struggling to climb out, until Lijs bent down and took the hides from him, and he could use his hands to push himself up and out, leaving her father naked and alone.

She imagined his face shrinking, his smile widening, as she had seen the corpses of sheep do when found in the veld long after death, their grins broad and hideous. She thought of her father’s brown-stained teeth, his thick beard, and pulled her mouth back, mimicking how he might look now, her lower lip tearing a little in the middle; so dry was her skin. She put a hand up to feel the tear, touching her smile, her small teeth, the gaps where some had fallen out and were starting to grow. He had lost a tooth too, she knew, could remember him walking around with a swollen cheek, unable to eat, and then trying to pull it out himself at first, before giving Gidean the pliers. The crunch of bone that followed, the call of pain, and then spitting out the shattered tooth onto the ground. She had come afterwards, picking out the pieces, washing them, fitting them together to see what the tooth had looked like when whole, cupping the pieces in her hand, keeping them like a secret.

Her mother had not yet let anyone know he had died, afraid of the auction, afraid of losing the little they had, years behind on the rent for the farm, and where could they go if not here? Her mother pregnant, walking about with her face hard, shouting at Lijs and Gidean, striking out at them, especially Job who had been carrying too many pumpkins at one time and dropped a large one, causing it to split open. Giving him a welt on the back of the legs for that, so bad that he had been limping since the previous day, and she had threatened to make it worse, standing in the doorway with the uintjie rod in her hand, pointing it at him, saying she would beat every part of him if he didn’t move faster with his chores. “Black and blue,” she called. “Do you hear me? Black and blue.” Her mouth opened again, ready to say more, but stopped when she heard horse’s hooves approaching. Cocking her head for a moment, trying to work out what it was, so rarely did people come to visit. Then, as the cloud of dust neared, she recognized it as a neighbour from a farm four or five miles distant, and clutched her hands to her chest, saying, “God preserve us. God have pity on us,” before hissing at Job to run into the veld and hide there until the neighbour had gone. “Tell your parents to keep away,” she added. “Remember, we say nothing, nothing.”

The neighbour drew up in the yard and dropped from his horse, patting the dust from his clothes, shaking it from his hat. He greeted her mother, looking about for a slave to come and see to his horse. When none came, he tied the bridle to the post himself and asked whether her father was home. Her mother said, No, he had gone after a leopard that had been attacking their sheep. But she was polite, inviting him in for coffee, letting him sit on the most comfortable stool.

He asked how many sheep they had lost to the leopard and she said, “More than we can afford to,” then sat looking at him, saying nothing, watching every sip he took of his coffee, waiting for him to finish and go.

He nodded, said that that was more or less why he had come. They had all lost more livestock than they could afford to; and just recently he and a few other farmers had been raided by local tribes. “We are putting together a commando to go after them and get our sheep and cattle back. Maybe we will come back with more than we lost.”

Her mother said she would pass the message on to her husband when he returned.

The neighbour cleared his throat, stood, said it was a long way yet to the next farm and the day wasn’t getting any younger. He thanked her mother for the coffee, then told them both the day and place for the meeting of the commando, saying that her father must make sure to bring his rifle and as much shot as he could spare. “It is time to make this final.”

Within an hour the labour pains started. She watched her mother sweeping the yard, watched as she paused from time to time, clutching the broom handle, breathing heavily, before sweeping again, a hand at her lower back for support. She wouldn’t let anyone take the broom from her, went up and down the yard two or three times, sweeping the same dust, making the same patterns. In the evening her mother insisted on preparing the food herself, wincing as she skinned the little grysbok Job had found in the snares that morning, continuing to wince while chopping uintjies and wild herbs. Her mother did not eat, walking slowly up and down the length of the front room, her jaw clenched.

She followed her mother’s movements for a while, saw that she was not looking, then held her plate out to Lijs, asking for a second helping. Job and Gidean held theirs out too. “Shame on you,” Lijs said. “Is that all you can think about?” Her mother groaned, pushed her back against the wall. Lijs took the plates from the men, told them to bring more firewood, rushing them when they didn’t stand up fast enough. Lijs told her to heat a pot of water on the coals, while she brought a handful of dried leaves out from her apron pocket and dropped them into the pot. Lijs poured the water into a wooden bowl and handed it to her mother. “Drink it slowly. It will help.”

The men came back and stacked the fire, the room growing uncomfortably warm. “That’s enough,” Lijs told them. “Go on now, it’s time to go. And take the nonnatjie with you.”           

By then it was dark outside and she didn’t know where she ought to go, following Gidean and Job to the only other building on the farm, a small kraal made of stones, with a thatched roof in one corner for the milk cow. Gidean lit a candle of sheep fat. It burnt smokily, the night seeming fogged, cold. The cow didn’t like the three of them crowding in around it. It was restless, tossing its head, kicking out with its back hooves. But Gidean began speaking to it in his own language, from the place he came from, a language even Lijs and Job didn’t know, speaking softly, until the cow calmed and allowed him to stroke its broad sides with his fingers. She sat in the blurry night, listening to those soft words, the cow’s steady breathing.

Later, Lijs came running into the yard, the candle flame out by then, calling into the dark, “Where are you? You must come.”

“Me?” said Gidean.

“No, let the nonnatjie come first.”

She got up from where she had been sleeping on the kraal floor, and walked drowsily to the house, expecting to see her mother holding a baby in her arms. Instead, she staggered across the lintel, awakened by the bright heat, the dark smell of blood. Her mother was leaning with both elbows on the table, coughing, her abdomen hard and swollen all the way up to her throat. She was panting, struggling to breathe, her eyes sunken, black-rimmed, her breath foul. Lijs came from behind and lifted the sodden skirt of her mother’s dress, showing thighs spattered with blood and faeces. Something black hung there too. She could not see what it was.

Lijs beckoned for her to come closer, pointed between her mother’s legs. “Your hands are smaller, maybe it will be easier for you. You need to push it back in and then try to move the baby to a different position.”

“What is it?”

“Come here, push this,” taking her by the hand and pressing it through her mother’s thighs until she grabbed hold of the black thing that hung there. Feeling it now, seeing it up close, and knowing what it was. A baby’s discoloured arm, the hand small, fingers outstretched. There was little space in which to move, and she could feel skin ripping as she pushed it inside her groaning mother.

“Can you feel the baby?” said Lijs. “Try to move it, it’s lying across, try to pull the head down to the opening. Have you got it?”

She didn’t know what she could feel, everything wet and stiff and stinking, nothing to hold onto, slipping away from her fingers. “I can’t get it,” she called, and Lijs came forward again, beginning to push down on her mother’s belly with hard strokes. She could feel the pressure of it through the muscle and fat, could feel it pressing her into the hard little body, pushing at her, pushing at her, until her hand was squeezed out, and the baby’s came after. Her mother screaming, “God help me, God help me, God help me!”

Lijs took vinegar and poured it on some bloody cloths, then bound them around her mother’s belly and back, making low sounds, hushing her, saying, “There, there, this will sort it, this will help.” Turning to her where she was wiping her arm and hand on her dress, saying, “Fetch Gidean.”

He was already in the yard and didn’t wait to be told to go inside. She stood in the doorway, afraid to return. Her mother shook her head when she saw him, tried to pull her skirts over herself, but Lijs held her down and he went behind her, tugging at the baby’s arm, taking hold first with one hand, then with both, his feet firm against the floor as he drew back. Something came loose and he fell away. Her mother shrieking now, and she could not stand it, this agony of birth and life, running out into the night trying to find a place where she could get away from the screams, but all those jagged rocks took them up, ripped them open, filled the sky with them, everything in pain now, everything bloody and in pain.

3

They had already started arriving the previous evening, spreading out across the veld with their wagons, leaving the oxen to graze on what they could find. There had been rain in the three months since she had last been home, and new shoots had started coming through, the ground damp, but not enough to stop the curls of dust that rose up at each new approach.

The yard was full, everything having been carried out of the house in the preceding days in order to be inventoried by the officials from the Orphan Chamber, and then separated into lots. Men wandered amongst the goods, seeing what was to be had. They picked up items, showed them to one another, put them back, came to look again, careful not to miss anything.

The women entered the empty house, carrying stools and hides they had brought from home. They put the older children to sleep in what had been the bedroom, and settled down on their stools in the front room, preparing for a night of talking, their babies at their breasts or on their laps. One of them had brought a pot with her, several had brought paper twists of coffee, or small contributions of sugar. They called in Job to build a fire for them, taking the opportunity to determine his character, his abilities, asking him about the scar on the back of his leg, and another on his forearm. The first was from a beating, he said, the other a burn from mishandling the cooking pot.

“Clumsy,” said one of the women. “And probably insolent.”

“Oh, he is young,” said another. “He can be taught.”

They drank their coffee, sharing bowls and cups with those who had forgotten to bring their own, growing flushed with the heat, the excitement, and speaking with animation of what had occurred in the months since they had last gathered. All the while eyeing the house, the wooden door, stroking a hand over the table that was built into the ground.

She sat in a corner by herself. Each of the women had taken their turn to come to her, to give their condolences, to say, “Poor child”, stroke her cheek or touch her hair, some reciting a verse from the Bible, and ending with “God sends us trials to test our faith,” before returning to their stools. Together, they spoke about her as though she did not exist, as though she had died too, and her presence in the room was as a corpse or a shadow, or something inanimate that required no attention. There was her father’s death to discuss, saying things they didn’t know to be true, and talking about the shame of it, the sinful, dreadful shame. Afterwards guessing about her mother’s death, how it must have been because of that shame, that there couldn’t be such an unforgivable sin without some retribution, some price to pay for it, and for having kept it a secret, hiding it from everyone for months, thinking they wouldn’t find out the truth eventually. But she didn’t need their made-up details, their coarse imaginings. She could see clearly how her mother had shaken for days, getting colder and darker, her face like boiled meat, her urine thick and muddy, all of her stinking, heaving and heaving, a grim rattle in her throat.

Burying her beside her father, the same as before, but no one taking the hides from around her body, no one being able to face seeing her naked and foul as she had been, even after cleaning. Lijs and Gidean walking out into the veld afterwards, talking intently, leaving her and Job to wonder what they had to speak about that could be so serious. Coming back and saying it had to be reported to someone, that it didn’t look good a child living alone with three slaves. People would think he had killed her parents, Gidean said. Lijs nodded.

“They wouldn’t think that. I would tell them what happened,” she’d said.

“They might not believe you.”

He had walked all day to the nearest neighbours, saying only that both her parents were dead, and the neighbours had come to fetch her, taking her back to stay with them, leaving Gidean and Lijs and Job to look after what little there was. They told her she was an orphan, that she must not worry, everything was hers, but it had to be sold, the money kept for her, less expenses of course, by the Orphan Chamber until she was 25 or until she found someone to marry. She had not understood at first, had asked, “But when do I go home?”

She had only returned when the neighbours did, coming to it like a stranger, the oxen slow, the wagon creaking. They had stopped along the way when they saw a herd of springbok. The men filling their rifles, taking aim, watching the buck scatter, the sound of hooves on the uneven earth. Two were down, a third hit but still moving, chased by the family’s three hounds, who stayed away a long time, coming back to the slow-trundling wagon with bloody snouts and full bellies, following the dripping corpses that hung at the back.

She jumped from her seat before they reached the house, running to where Gidean and Lijs stood, stopping when she saw the empty house, the full yard, the man walking amongst it all, writing on a piece of paper with a pencil stub. Job came from behind the house. He was taller than before, his face thinner. He did not smile at her or return her wave. The others also looked older, Gidean with a few white hairs growing at his temples, Lijs’s eyes strained and wrinkled. It seemed she had been away a long time. Despite the full yard, everything was neat and in order, but the fields remained empty as they had before. When she asked Gidean why he had not planted anything, he did not look at her, said, “There is no point now.”

xxx

In the morning the master of the Orphan Chamber set Lijs to work cooking breakfast in a large pot that he had brought with him. He sent Job out with a bell to wake the sleeping men in their wagons. They had been up late dancing and singing to the accompaniment of an out of tune fiddle. She had been unable to sleep with all the noise, the house strange with so many bodies, and now stood in the yard feeling out of place, not knowing where she was allowed to be or what she was allowed to do.

The men raised themselves stiffly at the bell, looking for coffee, which Lijs had in a large black kettle, but waited instead as Job and Gidean passed amongst them, pouring brandy and wine provided by the auctioneer. They knocked back their first rounds, then some went and lined up for breakfast, while others called Job over again, holding out bowls or cups or empty horns that he could fill once more. They ate from cabbage leaves, using spoons or forks they had brought from home, tossing the leaves to the floor when done, returning the cutlery to their pockets, while their dogs sniffed around their feet, licking the leaves clean.

At half past nine the auctioneer came and stood in front of the house, Job beside him, ringing the bell. Gidean carried a table from a wagon and placed it beside the auctioneer. Another man picked up an old saddle from the items lying in the yard and put it on the table.  The auctioneer called out what the item was, said that everyone had had ample time to inspect it already, but if anyone needed more time, let him say so now. No one spoke. “Who will give me five?” the auctioneer said. “Come now, five rixdollars for a saddle that still has some use in it. Do I hear five? How about three? Anyone for three? A fine saddle, still in decent condition. Do I have no takers? One, then, who will give me one? Take it home, polish it up, good as new. Nobody? Last chance, then, for this saddle, do I hear half a rixdollar? Who will give half? That’s as good as free, that is.”

“Mine,” said one of the men.

“Sold!”

After that came an axe, then the two uintjie rods, followed by her father’s rifle. She walked away then, could not stay to listen to the bids, the auctioneer’s rising voice, the excitement all around. Too little, whatever the amount was, and too much, nothing feeling right about selling this thing that her father had used to take his own life. Horrible, horrible, this sale of things so tarnished, so black with death.

She could not go far, was hemmed in by the circle of wagons, and though there were gaps between them, felt that she could not pass, that they were trapping her here in the yard, forcing her to stay. Many of the wagons had hottentot drivers, who had slept beneath the wagons the previous night, and who now sat together in a patch of shade, watching the sales as they were taking place. They pulled on hand-carved pipes, smoking their wild dagga tobacco that made them relaxed, smiling dully at what they saw. She wanted to go to them, not for anything other than that yellow feeling of sleepiness, of hazy warmth and calm, wanted to feel that with them, to lean back, smile, forget everything else.

She remembered her father’s pipes, there had been a few of them over the years, carved in the evenings or in quiet moments, when he had a good piece of wood. Wondering now whether they would be sold as a lot, or whether they would go separately, as the auctioneer had done with her mother’s two dresses, so that bits of her parents would be spread out across the district, and maybe in the years to come she would find herself face to face with them in other people’s front rooms, or at communion gatherings, and would she recognise them then, she wondered, or would they be as unrecognizable as any rock or leaf among which she had lived on the farm for all these years and never taken enough notice of?

When she got back to the yard, it was clear there had been more drinking, everyone loud, merry. The auctioneer called out, “Alright, listen, listen, that’s it, last lots now, then lunch afterwards.”

Someone made a joke she could not hear. There was laughter, a few hisses. Then Lijs was led forward. She wore no dress, only a band of cloth tied around her hips, and had her arms folded across her naked breasts. She was made to climb onto the table by the auctioneer’s assistant, to turn around, to hold out her arms, stop covering herself. “Let the people see, let them see what you have.”

“What are your skills?” the auctioneer said, then turned to the crowd. “I think there are those amongst us who would be very interested in knowing about your special skills.”

The men laughed, some of the women too.

“Come, come, tell us what you can do.”

“Yes, what can you do?”

Lijs closed her eyes, held her hands over her breasts. “I do the normal things. I cook, I clean, I wash, I sew when we have needle and thread.”

“And what else?” called one of the men, and the fiddler started playing, everyone joining in, clapping along, shouting, “Dance, dance, dance!” But Lijs was on her knees on the table, saying, “Please, I have a son, please, a husband. Buy us together, I beg of you, please, buy the three of us together.”

She did not stay to see whether anyone would listen to Lijs’s begging, walked back inside the empty house, the room dark and smelling of other people. She went to the place where she had found her father’s body, lay down as he had been, feeling a dark wound spread across her chest. From outside came the calls of “Mine”, “mine”, “mine”.

About the Author:

Karen Jennings is a South African author and have written several books, most notably An Island, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. She is represented by Lucy Luck of Conville and Walsh in the UK. In April of 2024, her fifth novel, Crooked Seeds, will be published in the United States by Hogarth, and will also be coming out with other presses in the UK, South Africa, Germany, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to novels, she has also published a collection of short stories (Away from the Dead) and a collection of poetry (Space Inhabited by Echoes). She is also the co-founder of The Island Prize for debut novels from Africa.

*Feature image by Maine Photography on Unsplash