‘It’s not that I don’t want you to have them, they’re just no good to you. It will damage your eyes wearing glasses not specially prescribed for you.’
‘But I can see better with them.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘But it is precisely the point.’ He looks at me sympathetically. ‘You’ve been to school for so many years and you still believe everything they tell you. It’s those magistrates again, they’ll be behind this nonsense for sure. Who can know better than myself whether these glasses are good for me or not?’
‘Well, I can’t pretend to know better than you do but there are experts who know,’ I insist, placing the glasses firmly on my nose.
‘Yes,’ he says pensively, ‘the longer they sit on school benches with chalk and slate, the less they know. Look, I believed all that because they’re supposed to be so clever — until I heard what the cleverest man of all had to say. The magistrate. He’s supposed to know right from wrong and it was he who said it. filth.’
Skitterboud spits vigorously.
‘He knows nothing of right and wrong. All those people he locks up, you can be sure they know more than he does. Oh, they think they know so much but they know nothing, nothing. When I take off my hat and say, “Yes Baas, yes my grootbaas,” and hold my hat to my chest, I have to squint and chew my cheeks to keep from laughing out loud.’
He mimics in a grave voice: “‘Spend your pay carefully, Skitterboud. Here’s your bottle of wine, now you won’t need any more, and I know you people dance all night but get to church on Sunday, the sheep won’t need you then.”
‘I say, “Yes Baas,” and I don’t say that no one dances any more, that the young people have left. Ag man, they don’t know anything, even with all those important bits of paper. They remember nothing,’ and his Afrikaans slows down according to his idea of posh, ‘need to peer over their glasses to check their papers all the time. I was afraid of him all right, of the magistrate who married us. And it was Ounooi’s idea when Meid went with the children. She said, “Skittie, you’re a legally married man, a respectable Bushman. This is a case for the court. The Baas-magistrate will get the children back, he’ll settle this business for you.”’
‘So it was the children you wanted,’ I interrupt.
His tone is defensive. ‘You miss the laughing and the crying and the fighting of the children. You don’t always notice them when they’re there but when they’re gone the silence lurks in the corners like a sulking tokolos.’
The stick in his right hand sweeps careful arcs, clearing away the larger pebbles that fly off beyond its range. It is a young Jan Twakkie shoot, pliant, so that he is able to flatten some of its length on the ground and widen the clearing.
‘I shouted for them across the veld and Meid leaned over the latched lower door (Giel was flash; he had built a lower and upper door out of old planks) and she said, “Skittie, they won’t come. They live here now with me. They’ll see you tomorrow, they’ll see you every day, but first they must get used to sleeping here.” And all the while she was flicking with a nail at one of the panels of the door where old green paint had been flaking off for years, and only at the end of her speech did she look up.’
He grinds his heels into the ground and shifts his haunches as he orders away the face, the burrowing nails.
‘Eeh,’ he sighs, ‘I didn’t need glasses in those days,’ and he holds out his hand to have another look. I oblige. ‘Mine were the best eyes in Namaqualand.’ I look dubiously into the faded pupils, dull like old marbles scratched over the years by boys who play rough and cheating games.
‘I had,’ he insists. ‘Never a missing sheep.’ But even this route betrays him into the story. ‘Except that once when Baas Karel knew, but I didn’t say a word, not a word about Giel.’
Skitterboud wrinkles his nose to adjust the glasses. He is resigned to telling the story. His Namaqua vowels dip sharply, angrily.
‘I said to the magistrate — his nose you know had disappeared by then. Funny that was, he ended up with quite a small nose for a white man, but his ears had grown, limp soutslaai leaves that fell from the close-clipped back and sides of his head like those of a freshly shorn merino. I could swear that he wasn’t the magistrate but of course he was and anyway I had seen him only the once before, and I said to him, “It’s Dapperman and Blom, the baby doesn’t count, he’s still drinking at his mamma.” And as before the magistrate looked up to the back of the courtroom and said in a voice of thunder to the wooden beam, “Magriet September is the lawfully wedded wife of Johannes” (that’s my real name) “and has no right to take away with her anything from his house. Everything, from the children to the last scrap of underclothing she is wearing, belongs to him and is his right to retrieve.”
‘Now yes, at that point I shut my ears and listened no more and when I came out I spat out those words into the hot red sand and watched it sizzle. And there was nothing to do about my shame. I just had to wear it like the tie and jacket I bought from Baas Karel for the court. Everyone knew where I had been that day, the whole of Rooiberg knew of the filthy words of the magistrate. That he should want me to make her undress and keep all her clothes and send her running across to Giel naked under the roasting sun. Well, I shut my door when I got home and didn’t go down to Oompie Piet’s where a huge fire burned in the shelter and lit the faces of those listening to Oompie Piet’s stories. No, I went to sleep on those shameful words.’
‘Skittie,’ I say, breaking the silence, ‘perhaps you had better keep the glasses. I expect they will be more useful to you.’
His face cracks with a cock-a-doodle-doo of laughter so that I jump at the opportunity.
‘So you and Meid became good neighbours?’
‘Yes,’ he replies tersely. ‘I stayed in town till the evening and brought back a flagon of wine which I finished behind that closed door. So I found my way over to Giel’s house and dragged her out and slapped her once, twice, before Giel stopped me. It was a bitter day of shame for me, but you see when I woke up the next morning in the ditch where Giel had dropped me I knew that under the red eye of the sun we could drink a cup of coffee together. Meid always knew things. She wouldn’t have allowed me to hit her if it wasn’t for the baby in her belly. She said straight away that it was the fault of the magistrate; that the tokolos lurking about Rooiberg had an uncommonly large nose.’
Skitterboud walks off without further explanation. His chin is raised in recognition of the glasses he wears so that his last words whirl off in a gust of wind. I watch the slight figure lean hare-like as he makes his way across the veld.
ASH ON MY SLEEVE
Desmond is a man who relies on the communicative powers of the handshake. Which renders my hand, a cluster of crushed bones, inert as he takes a step back and nods approvingly while still applying the pressure. He attempts what proves impossible in spite of my decision to cooperate. That is to stand back even further in order to inspect me more thoroughly without releasing my hand. The distance between us cannot be lengthened and I am about to point out this unalterable fact when his smile relaxes into speech.
‘Well what a surprise!’
‘Yes, what a surprise,’ I contribute.
It is of course no longer a surprise. I arranged the meeting two months ago when I wrote to Moira after years of silence between us, and yesterday I telephoned to confirm the visit. And I had met Desmond before, in fact at the same party at which Moira had been struck by the eloquence of his handshake. Then we discussed the role of the Student Representative Council, he, a final year Commerce student, confidently, his voice remaining even as he bent down to tie a shoe-lace. And while I floundered, lost in subordinate clauses, he excused himself with a hurried, ‘Back in a moment.’ We have not spoken since.