Lettah's Gift Read online

  The old man pauses. He rests a gnarled hand on the haunch of meat. ‘I remember. Mr Malan owned it. It’s been sold twice since he left.’

  ‘My family were friends of the Malans. We lost touch with them years ago. Do you know where they’ve gone?’

  The old man rubs his beard with the back of his hand. ‘I can’t say for sure. I think Mr and Mrs Malan went down south. After the war.’

  ‘I was hoping to find Brak Malan. Their son.’

  ‘The wild one.’ The old man taps his temple with his finger. ‘Not right in the head. Always in trouble. The last I heard he was working on the Baldwin farm.’

  ‘Vic Baldwin?’

  ‘Yes. But that farm has been occupied by war veterans. Mr Baldwin moved to Bulawayo. What has happened to your friend, I have no idea. I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.’

  I return to the car. A beggar emerges from the shade of a nearby tree and quickly relieves me of the change I got from the shopkeeper. Driving out of town, I wonder if it’s possible to live here without a heart hardened to poverty.

  Just beyond the Kwekwe River I’m waved down at a police roadblock. Officers in blue combat fatigues carrying rifles ask the purpose of my visit. They are mildly intrigued by my claim to be a tourist, but wave me through – tourists are rare birds these days, it seems. I drive on towards Bulawayo. I turn on the radio and twist the station dial, but find only static. Finding out so little about the Malans is disappointing; I’d hoped Brak might still be around, but knew it was a long shot.

  The last image I have of him is in a photograph which came with a letter – the last letter – he sent during the war, long after my family had left Rhodesia. It’s not an easy image. Brak is standing with a group of soldiers in a bush clearing. Two helicopters wait in the background, their blades spinning, the air thick with dust. Beyond the helicopters are some big granite kopjes. Brak and the other men are laughing. They look like savages, like wild men – filthy and unkempt; sweat streaks their faces; one has a bleeding hand. Brak’s pale blue eyes shine vacantly. He is wearing the non-restrictive gear that Rhodesian soldiers preferred – a short-sleeved camouflage shirt, shorts and running shoes, no socks. Ammunition pouches around his waist. No headgear. He leans on his rifle as casually as those cowboys and soldiers did in the movies we watched long ago. And there, poking into the picture in the background near one of the helicopters, are the sprawled-out legs of a corpse. No face, no body – just bloodstained khaki trousers and bare black feet.

  What did Brak intend by sending that photograph? Was it to shock? Or did he not even notice the corpse in the background? Were corpses just part of the landscape, like rocks and trees? He never explained it in the letter.

  II

  The shock of being back is such that I’m not quite here. And yet the bush and open grasslands that flash by seem so utterly familiar it’s as though my entire life away from Africa was lived in the blink of an eye. As my head gropes for terra firma, I feel her watching me. Lydia. The one who has brought me here to find Lettah.

  I remember how they used to chat away in the kitchen at Sunnyside. Lydia, a farmer’s daughter, spoke fluent IsiNdebele. Lettah was a rural Ndebele, raw and uneducated. A plump woman, always cheerful, given to bouts of infectious laughter. Listening to them prattling on in the kitchen, you’d have thought they were on equal terms – friends, even. They gossiped and laughed; carefree, unrestrained. Their relationship seemed devoid of the complex protocol that separated white women from their servants. They had much in common. Both had grown up on Whitestone, a fifteen-thousand-hectare farm near Fort Rixon owned by Lydia’s parents, Cyril and Betty Metcalf. Lettah was the daughter of Whitestone’s headman, Solomon Ndlovu. The farm was their common ground, the place where their different worlds intersected. They had known each other since childhood and their familiarity was such that they could tease one another about intimate things, such as their tendency to put on weight – for Lettah, an attribute of beauty; for Lydia, a curse.

  But there was a line that Lettah could not cross. My mother was a complex, emotional woman, at the mercy of a heart that in an instant could melt like butter or turn to stone. Any familiarity between them was at her discretion. Perhaps Lettah enjoyed more privileges than most domestic servants, but in the end that’s all she was – a black servant in colonial Rhodesia. She was secure as long as she knew her place.

  And so it was during our time in Rhodesia. Lettah’s happy presence. Part of the family, almost. She followed us when we moved to Salisbury and Bulawayo. The memory of her becomes slightly clearer in these other places. Her face acquires a sharper focus: beautiful almond eyes, like an Egyptian queen; the straight ridge of her nose, flared nostrils; her curling lips. Always neat and clean in her pale blue servant’s uniform and headscarf. Always laughing. Her lilting songs as she went about washing and ironing clothes, making beds and cleaning the many rooms of the increasingly up-market homes we rented. She lived in the servants’ quarters of these properties, the khaya – usually a bare unpainted room with an adjoining toilet and shower. The toilet was just a hole in the floor and smelled of bleach. The discrepancy in living conditions never struck me as odd. This is what Africans were used to, I was told. This was luxury for her. After all, had Lettah not come from a hut in the bush?

  Then it all changed. The friendly chatter in the kitchen suddenly ceased. Lettah became reserved and tearful, subject to relentless reproach from Lydia. One day she was gone.

  It was so unexpected even my father, Errol, was caught unawares. He had no idea what had caused the rift, and no say in the matter. Lydia would not brook any interference in domestic affairs, including the hiring and firing of servants. Max and I were heartbroken at Lettah’s sudden absence. We missed her cheerful company, her infectious laughter. We were made suddenly aware of how closely we had bonded with her – it was no exaggeration to say she was a second mother to us. And we had no idea of the intractable politics lurking between whites and their servants, or of any line that could not be crossed – that must have been crossed. But if anyone mentioned the matter, Lydia would withdraw into a fortress of stubborn silence. Even when Max and I were grown up the issue remained out of bounds.

  My father got a job with a fertiliser company in South Africa and we moved down to Pietermaritzburg. There was a new home, a new town, a new country. Lydia employed new servants. As I grew into my teens, Lettah began to fade from my memory. For a while we heard odd bits about her from my grandparents. We heard that she’d planned to marry, but a bad miscarriage had left her infertile and her suitor discarded her for someone else who could bear his offspring. Devastated, she had taken refuge back on Whitestone with her father, Solomon. Cyril and Betty took pity on her and employed her three days a week.

  Max and I wrote to her but she was illiterate and could not respond, except through sparsely worded messages relayed through occasional letters from Cyril and Betty. Lettah says it’s good that you have a nice new home. She says work hard at school. We soon grew bored with this second-hand contact and our letters petered out.

  The war in Rhodesia erupted and quickly began to escalate. The news was full of grim stories of attacks on lonely farmsteads in the dead of night, of atrocities inflicted on defenceless innocents. Farmers we knew were killed. A boy Max knew in junior school died in a landmine explosion. Isolated farms like Whitestone were the sort of soft targets favoured by the guerrillas – terrorists in the eyes of Rhodesians – infiltrating from Mozambique and Zambia. Errol and Lydia thought it too risky to visit the farm so they paid for Cyril and Betty to come down to South Africa once a year, usually over Christmas.

  Cyril and Betty doted on their daughter. Lydia’s brother, Maxwell, was killed in North Africa in the Second World War. Since we were their only grandchildren, they also doted on Max and me. Each year we hired the same beachside cottage at Port Edward on the south coast for their visits. The old people
would sit on the veranda all day gazing out at the Indian Ocean and listening to the waves breaking on the rocks close by. They never tired of the sight of all that water. An early riser, Cyril would get up before dawn, make himself a cup of coffee and go outside to watch the sunrise. Betty found him there one morning, dead from a heart attack. He was seated in his chair as though sound asleep. I remember Betty and Lydia’s voices raised in alarm, their crying; my father steering me and Max away from the scene. Just a glimpse of the old man in his dressing-gown hunched forward in his chair, his back to us. A broken cup on the floor.

  Lydia accompanied her mother back to Rhodesia. The funeral was held at the Daisyfield church near Shangani. Cyril was laid to rest in the graveyard near the church, next to his son, Maxwell. Betty had to sell up and move into a flat in Bulawayo. She had offered the farm to my parents, but Errol knew that to take on the debt-ridden place would be an uphill battle, especially with the war raging. Betty died two years later and was also buried in the cemetery at Daisyfield. Lydia organised the funeral. She said that Lettah attended with her father and some other workers from Whitestone. She didn’t get the chance to talk to her, or so she said.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a sudden realisation. I’ve been crossing the vast grassland plains near the town of Gweru. On both sides of the road fields of grass stretch to the horizons. Yet there are no cattle. The fields are empty, except for the odd squatter’s kraal, three or four mud huts in each, amid meagre plots of dying maize.

  Islands of poverty in seas of grass . . .

  After Betty died we heard no more about Lettah. We got on with our new lives. We liked Pietermaritzburg. A nice, friendly town, far from the troubles in Rhodesia – a good place for Max and me to grow up in. Max started pushing weights in his adolescent years and quickly developed into a massive, acne-ridden slab of muscle. At Maritzburg College, he captained the First XV and was opening batsman for the First XI. He held the school record for discus throwing and shot-put. A ferocious water polo player, a deputy head prefect, a conscientious student with an aptitude for science and mathematics. In his spare time, he joined a canoeing club and each year competed in the singles of the Dusi Marathon, always finishing in the top twenty.

  Unlike Max, I found it hard to embrace Maritzburg College’s antiquated ethos, fastidiously modelled on British public schools of the Victorian era. Apathy and a fierce aversion to team sports ensured my permanent billing among the school’s no-hopers. Athletically, I wasn’t entirely without talent. Being of lanky build, I showed promise as a swimmer, but never reached my full potential due principally to a smoking habit I picked up at age fifteen. Academically, I inclined to the Arts. My best subject was English, for which I always received good marks. I read avidly and began to write short stories, rather slavishly in the style of Ernest Hemingway, which my English teachers praised inordinately, literary pretensions being something of a rarity among my sports-mad peers. I was vaguely interested in history and geography. The rest was a torment. I scraped through each year by the skin of my teeth. My father fumed at report cards that labelled me ‘scatterbrained’ and ‘bone idle’. He despaired at my low marks; he castigated me for my laziness.

  Lydia never closed ranks with him on this. She believed I would yet prove myself. She had faith that my creative bent would one day flower and dazzle everyone. As any psychologist knows, the belief of mothers in their sons often verges on the chronically delusional, yet I did vindicate her faith to some extent when I matriculated with a university pass.

  After school Max did his compulsory national service in the Parabats, an elite parachute battalion based in Bloemfontein, where he attained the rank of second lieutenant. He emerged from the army with his mental faculties reasonably intact and immediately breezed through a BCom at the University of Natal. During this time he became a Springbok canoeist and won the Dusi Marathon twice. For some ‘pocket money’ he started making fibreglass canoes and surf skis. Much to his surprise, this backyard business suddenly burgeoned; soon he was renting a factory, employing people and exporting overseas. The Australian market proved particularly lucrative; Max established outlets in Perth and Sydney. In 1976, just when the townships in South Africa began to erupt, he moved to Australia permanently. He went with Errol and Lydia’s blessing, though Lydia was depressed and tearful for months after.

  Nothing elite about my national service. The plain old infantry battalion in Middelburg did its best to mould me into the killing machine it needed to defend South Africa, but ultimately decided it could function more efficiently if I was restricted to ‘maintenance duties’. And so I whiled away my time painting the camp’s diamond-mesh perimeter fences silver – a task I rather enjoyed, since it allowed my mind to wander.

  After discharge, I began a BA at the University of Natal, majoring in English and History. For the first time in my life I was enthused by the prospect of study and achieved consistently high results. During this time, I began to write again. I had a short story included in an anthology of new writing published by the university, and several others found their way into minor literary journals. When I graduated with a Distinction in Modern English Literature I couldn’t help noticing Lydia’s I-told-you-so expression in the presence of Errol. Never suspecting, of course, that this would be the high point, my life’s modest summit. Ahead, just the slow descent . . .

  Because I had no idea what to do after graduating I reluctantly undertook a teaching diploma, at my father’s urging. For two years I was a relief English teacher in various high schools around Pietermaritzburg. I liked teaching about as much as I liked being taught, which fell well short of painting diamond-mesh fences. A long period of inertia followed. I flitted between jobs. At twenty-seven I was still living with my parents. Then I received a letter from Max, extolling the virtues of Australia, urging me to emigrate. He had since married and had two children, a girl and boy. They lived in a big house in up-market Dalkeith. Max missed his family, but business was too good to think of returning to South Africa. His canoe and surf-ski enterprise had expanded into other products; he was making a killing manufacturing fibreglass guttering and fascia boards for the building industry. He hoped that by my leaving, Errol and Lydia would soon follow. If you come over, he wrote, the folks will be on the next plane, guaranteed.

  I decided that greener fields lay in Australia. I talked it over with Errol and Lydia. They agreed the move would do me no harm, since my life seemed in limbo anyway. I applied to emigrate and was accepted on the basis of my teaching qualification.

  And so I found myself in Perth. At first I stayed with Max and his Aussie wife, Michaela, in Dalkeith while looking for work. Admittedly, I might not have given the impression of looking very hard. I steadfastly refused to teach, yet nothing else seemed up to scratch. Max offered me a job as a floor manager in one of his factories; it took just one visit to the factory to realise that the smell of resin and the cacophony of sanding machines did not agree with me, so I declined. This irked Max no end. More than once he called me a bludger to my face.

  I now had big brother glowering over my shoulder, not to mention that powerful telescope Lydia kept trained on me from across the Indian Ocean. The only way to get the two of them off my back was to compromise on the issue of teaching. I soon got a post at St Xavier’s College, a Catholic high school in the northern suburb of Scarborough. I took out a loan and bought a small flat with a glimpse of the ocean not far from the school. And so I commenced a bland professional life teaching English to teenagers whose only purpose appeared to be to remind me of my own indolent adolescence. In fairness, I should say that I wasn’t a bad teacher; I performed my duties with due diligence and even sporadic bursts of enthusiasm. And some of the brighter kids did provide a measure of satisfaction, but never enough to alter my view of teaching as a thankless and servile calling.

  Outside the classroom, though, life was generally good. I liked Australia. I felt at home in my ne
w country and barely missed Africa. Australia offered a safe future, along with social and political freedoms hitherto unknown to me. It seemed to cut people like me, whose minds wander, a bit of slack. I started writing again. Living on my own enabled me to establish a productive routine, notwithstanding weekends which were set aside for some serious sampling of Australia’s beer and wine. Perth’s sunny skies also rekindled in me a love for swimming. Each weekday I rose before dawn to put in at least two hours at the typewriter before heading off to school. After knocking off, I’d go down to Scarborough Beach and complete a two-kilometre surf swim, weather permitting. I even contemplated joining a lifesaving club, but my loathing of team culture quickly nipped that in the bud. I began a novel tentatively called The Wastrel, a meandering tale about a young South African migrant in Perth who wins the lotto and proceeds to squander the money through riotous living. It took me two years to finish. I began the slow death of sending samples to agents and publishers and having them returned. A sense of failure grew. Naiveté is perhaps my worst character defect. It took a while to twig that a book about a debauched white South African émigré might not be a sure-fire success at a time when people of conscience were sickened by the horrors of apartheid.

  Contrary to Max’s expectations, Errol and Lydia didn’t immediately follow me to Australia. Their move came ten years later, once Errol reached retirement age. They were installed in a granny flat Max had built especially, adjoining his house. They were happy to have their sons around them again. They were besotted by their grandchildren and got on well with Michaela, a bubbly, gregarious soul. Naturally, they missed Africa but were never ones to mope around pining for the past. Recognising the pitfalls of nostalgia, they avoided expatriate cliques, occupying themselves with local church activities, gardening, playing bowls and watching the grandchildren grow up. Lydia liked a flutter on the horseraces now and then.