A Change of Climate: A Novel (24 page)

“No, they wouldn’t,” Anna said. “If we turned up in Jo’burg or Pretoria they’d put us back in jail.”

“Me, perhaps—not you, surely?”

“Why not? They put me in jail before.” Anna shook her head. “Forget it, Ralph. I don’t want to set foot on that soil. I don’t want that kind of compassion.”

Three weeks before the birth she did go south, but only to Lobatsi, a small town on the railway line. She had booked herself in at the Athlone Hospital; if something went wrong, she and the babies had a better chance here than they would have up-country. She believed in the twins, they were no longer a subject for conjecture; she imagined she could feel the two new hearts beating below her own. While she waited to be proved correct, she passed her days sitting at her window in the Lobatsi Hotel, watching the populace pushing into the Indian trading stores, wanting buckets and sacks of sugar and sewing cotton and beer. Men who had called at the butchers dragged up the dusty road, carrying sticky parcels from which gray intestines flopped. Women sat on the hotel steps and sold knitted hats; when evening came their daughters sat there and sold their bodies, elbowing each other and shrieking while they waited for trade, passing from hand to hand a cigarette, a plastic comb, a mirror encrusted with glass jewels.

The weather was cool, blue and still, the mornings sharp with frost. There were few white faces in the street. She listened every day for the call of the train, from the track beyond the eucalyptus trees; she saw the procession that trailed to the station, women hauling sacks of onions and laden with boxes and bags, and boys with oranges running to sell them to the travelers. When the train drew in, the passengers mobbed it, swinging from its sides and swaying from it, as if it were a steer that must be wrestled to earth. Sometimes it seemed to her that the whole country was on the move; yet she became stiller, heavier, more acquiescent to the strangeness and the pain that lay ahead.

In the depth of winter, and before dawn, her babies were born. Her own Dutch doctor had intended to be there with her, but he had been delayed, impeded somehow—broken axle, perhaps, or sudden minor epidemic—and she felt some protection had been withdrawn. She heard strange voices in the corridors, and the moans of another woman in labor; and this sound seemed to come to her now from her left, now from her right, now from the hospital gardens beyond her window and once perhaps from her own throat. When her daughter was born she held out her arms for the child, but when her son was born she had become an object, leaden with fatigue, her arms no longer hers to command. She heard him cry, and turned her head with difficulty, very slowly, to see him in a nurse’s hands, his body transfixed by a shaft of early light. Ralph stood by her bed, and held her hand as if it were a stone. They had already chosen a girl’s name, Katherine. “The boy after your father,” Anna whispered. “Because it will heal … because it will heal …”

Because it will heal all wounds. She left him suddenly, hurtling into sleep like an unstrung climber from a cliff face.

The doctor took Ralph by the arm and led him from the room. His heart felt small, very heavy, a pebble in his chest, contracted with shock and fear at the sight of the bloody streaked beings his wife’s body had produced. Later that day, after he had slept for a couple of hours, he went to see the babies again. He saw that there was no reason to be afraid. The twins were small, but healthy. They had curls of black hair, and eyes of black-gray: hard but melting, like the eyes of puppies.

months that followed were months of a lulling calm, shot through by the small emergencies of infant illness and ill-temper, by the vagaries of life in the wasteland; and these months, when Ralph and Anna looked back on their time in the protectorate, would seem like years. They were years of air so dry it seemed to burn the lungs; years of thorn and scrub, of a fine dust that covers every surface. The country’s spectrum was narrow: rose red, through brick, through lion-color, to stone. In summer, under the sun’s unclosing eye, the landscape seemed flattened, two-dimensional, as if it were always noon. Mosquitoes whined in the darkness, plunging unseen at swollen ankle veins, and ticks bit and clung and swelled fat with blood, engorged like blue-gray peas. About the place early one morning, inhaling a hot dawn mist, Ralph saw baboons in the garden, stripping the fig tree, handling the wormy fruit with murmurs of appreciation. Still as death, he watched them from the back stoep; it was as if he were watching someone else’s dream, or the reenactment of a myth. It puzzled him; he could not say what myth it was.

In summer the sky was violet, sullen; when storms came, the downpour whipped garden snakes from their heat trances. Green mamba, boomslang, spitting cobra: after the rains, the ground seethed like a living carpet. Six legs, eight legs, no legs: everything moved.

Salome found a woman called Felicia, to be the children’s nanny. Felicia must have her own home; the mother and children who had taken over the third servants’ hut moved out, and Felicia moved in. She would have a bed in the twins’ room, but she must have privacy, a place for her possessions; and I, Anna thought, wish sometimes to be alone in my house. The displaced family built themselves a lean-to. They seemed to accept the situation. Still they waited, week after week, to be called to Anna’s service.

Felicia was a tall erect woman with a smooth face and thin, almost Hamitic features. She was twenty-three years old, she said, was a mission girl herself, and had two children, who stayed with their grandmother in Kanye, in another part of the country. It was Matthew she liked best to carry on her back, but—as if in compensation—she placed on Katherine’s wrist a bracelet of tiny blue beads. When the babies were tiny, she wafted the cattle flies from their faces, and soothed one while Anna fed the other; when they grew she taught them to sit up and clap their hands and sing a song. She was scrupulous and clean, diligent and polite, but she spoke when she was spoken to, and then just barely. Her thoughts, she reserved to herself.

In winter there were porcupine quills on the paths, and the nights were as sharp as the blade of a knife. The waterless months brought wild animals to the edge of settlements, and once again the baboons crept down at dawn, shadowing the compound families, waiting to seize a porridge-pot left unwatched. Once, early in the morning and from a distance, Anna saw a leopard, an area of clouded darkness covering his chest. The darkness was fresh blood, she supposed; she imagined how the sun would dry it, and the spotted fur stiffen into points.

Anna spoke now in an arbitrary blend of English, Setswana, Afrikaans—any language which served. She loved her children with an intemperate blend of fear and desire; fear of insects and snakes, desire for their essence, for their shackled twin souls to be made free. She placed the brother beside the sister, watched them creep together, entwine limbs; she wished for them to grow and speak, to separate, to announce themselves as persons. An only child, she envied them and found them strange. When she prayed, which was almost never, it was only for Ralph: God preserve his innocence, and protect him from the consequences of it. She felt it was a dangerous thing, his bewilderment in the face of human wickedness; she felt that it left them exposed. She had been told as a child that you could not strike bargains with God, but she had never understood why not; surely God, if he had once been Man, would retain a human desire for advantage? Where simple strength is required, she bargained, let Ralph provide it; but where there are complexities, give them to me. Alone in her schoolroom and her house, below the tropic of Capricorn, she saw her path in life tangled, choked, thorny, like one of the cut-lines that ran through the bush and melted away into the desert.

Later, of course, she wondered at herself; how could she not have seen the road ahead? Even in the early days—before the wisdom conferred by the event—any trouble, any possible trouble, seemed to settle around the sullen, fugitive form of Enock, the man who was nominally in charge of the garden.

Enock, like them, was a refugee from the south. So they understood; asked where he came from, he nodded his head indifferently toward the border, and said, “Over that side.” Ralph tried to talk to him: look, whatever you’ve done there, whatever happened, it doesn’t matter, that was there and this is a different country. Ralph suspected that Enock had been in prison, for some petty criminality rather than for some offense against the race laws; though they make sure you can’t distinguish, he said, between a criminal act and an act of protest, and God knows, he said, if a man like Enock were to cheat or steal, should we make a judgment? Who can say what I would do, in his shoes, in the shoes of a black man in South Africa today?

But then Ralph would come back, from another dragging, weary quarter hour with Enock, and say, well, we never get anywhere. I’m just a white man to him.

Anna nodded. “And isn’t he just a black man to you?”

“I try not to think like that.”

“How can you not? You have to make him into something. A victim. Or a hero. One or the other.”

“Yes. Perhaps you’re right.”

“But it’s not like that. He’s just an individual.” She considered. “And I think as an individual he’s a waste of time.”

Ralph shook his head; he wouldn’t have it. “We can’t know what his life has been. How can you know? You are talking to him and he walks away.”

“And yet he understands you. He understands what you say.”

“Oh yes, that’s not his problem. He reminds me of Clara sometimes—do you remember how she would freeze you out? I used to wonder if something so terrible had happened to her that she just couldn’t bring herself to speak about it—she seemed numb. And Enock’s like that. Oh well,” Ralph said. “If I think I can help him, I must be patient and persist.”

Enock was about thirty years old, a handsome and composed man, with the same thin features as Felicia, an even, impassive face. He wore tattered khaki shorts and the cast-off jacket of a European-style suit. Ralph wondered about the original owner—who would have bought such a thing? The jacket was tan, and it was tight under his arms, and shiny from wear. Sometimes, when he went about his tasks, he would take it off and hang it on the branch of a tree. One day, the puppy took it down and worried it; Anna dragged it from his jaws in a state not too far from the original, but she felt that this was one more grievance for the gardener to chalk up on his soul.

This dog of theirs;
your
dog, she said to Ralph, when it ate books and dragged blankets outside into the dust. Ralph had brought the puppy home from a trip to Palapye, a settlement on the railway line; he had climbed out of the truck dazzled by the sun, thirsty, weary, coated in dust, and put into her hands a baffling fur bundle, an indecipherable animal like a tiny bear, with boot-button eyes and a dense, lemon-colored coat. “Whatever is it?” she had said, alarmed, and Ralph had said, reassuringly, just a dog. The

McPhersons gave him to me; they said, this is what you need, a dog about the place.

“What a strange thought for them to have,” Anna said. “Don’t they think two babies are enough?”

“The babies don’t bark,” Ralph said. “That’s what he’s for, a watchdog, not a pet.”

“I suppose he can be both.”

“When I was a child I was never allowed to have a dog.”

“Nor me,” Anna said. “I had a goldfish once, but it died. Just as well. I always thought that my papa would usher some customers through from the shop, and tell them he could get two fillets out of it.”

“So,” Ralph said. “So, you see, the twins, they’ll have a dog, and we didn’t have.”

“What is it, anyway, what breed?”

“The McPhersons claim its mother is a pure bred Alsatian, and they did—Anna, give me another glass of water—they did show her to me, and she looked authentic—but then they say his father is a yellow Labrador, also of good pedigree. I can’t believe that. I think his mum climbed out of the compound and took potluck.”

That was what they called the dog: Potluck. Potluck, as young things do, passed through a phase of great beauty. His button eyes grew large and lustrous, and his lemon fur turned to the color of butterscotch. His temperament was mild, and when the twins were fractious and unrewarding Anna would pick him up and kiss the velvet, benign space between his ears. Even Salome and Felicia, who did not see the point of dogs, would sometimes take time to speak to him, and caress him in a gingerly way.

At the age of eight months Potluck grew ugly. His head was huge, his muzzle blunt, his ears pointed different ways; he developed brusque, selective barking, like an old colonel suddenly moved to write to the papers. Almost grown now, he shambled around the mission compound, winning friends and giving offense. “It is a horrible, English trait,” Ralph said, “to despise people who are afraid of dogs.”

“Enock’s not afraid,” Anna said. “He just affects to be.”

“I like to think well of Enock,” Ralph said, “and in fact I make it my policy, but it has to be said that he’s becoming a bloody nuisance.”

It was Salome who had begun the complaints. “He has stolen from me,” she said. “My straw hat.”

“Do you think so?” Anna said. “What would Enock do with your straw hat?”

“Sell it,” Salome said. Anna almost asked, sarcastically, and what do you think it would be worth? She checked herself. These people negotiate in pennies, rather than shillings, so perhaps it’s true, perhaps Enock has sold her hat.

She said to Ralph, “Salome is always complaining about Enock, and now she says he’s raiding her wardrobe.”

“Then I must have a word with him. We can’t have Salome upset. Do you think she’s telling the truth?”

Anna frowned. “Hard to know. She has a preoccupation with clothes at the moment. She thinks she should be given dresses, castoffs. But I have a difficulty here, because I can’t manufacture castoffs, no one can. I could make her a dress, that would be no problem, but it wouldn’t be the same, it’s
my
clothes she wants.”

“Nothing of yours would fit her,” Ralph said. “Even if you wore your clothes out, which you don’t.”