Читать книгу Landscapes of short stories for Gr 10 Second Additional Language - Blanche Scheffler - Страница 9

by Rodney Gedye

A note about the story

This romantic story deals with more than the love relationship between two young people, Sarie and Jan. Against the backdrop of a fishing community, they are challenged by an accident that changes Jan’s life and he feels he has lost his identity and everything he had, including Sarie’s love. He is seriously wrong, not understanding how much she loves him. When he drunkenly attacks someone in the community, he runs away, thinking that he has killed the man. Sarie goes after him, knowing where he would hide from the police, and tries to persuade him to give himself up. She challenges him to do what is right – and when something happens to her, he has to overcome his own fears for her sake.

The writer creates a vivid picture not only of the fishing village and some of its inhabitants, but also of the sea, from which they gain their livelihood. When this relationship between man and nature is disrupted, a fisherman might well lose hope of future happiness. Two dramatic events have a direct impact on the young fisherman’s life; how he deals with each circumstance affects his relationship with the girl he loves directly. How she deals with his problems reveals her strength of character and love. The theme of guilt and redemption runs through the story; the plot structure addresses common moral issues; and the characters demonstrate that love and understanding should underpin our personal relationships.

Pre-reading

•Discuss the title: what could a black star be a symbol of?

•Skim the story for the names of all the characters and write them down. How do you know who the main characters are?

•Go through the footnotes to make sure that you understand unfamiliar expressions and can refer to them quickly when reading the story.

During reading

Remember to refer to a footnote when you come across an unfamiliar word.

•Try to understand Jan’s feelings about his accident.

•Try to pick out what is:

–background information about Sarie and Jan’s relationship

–the situation at the point where Sarie learns about Jan’s present situation.

Black star

Sarie reached the top of the spur and straightened up, bracing her bare feet against the slope of the rock. Before her lay the fishing beach, with a line of boats – bright and big-bellied as giant puff-fish thrown up to die – basking above the highwater mark.

A warm breeze, sweeping up the smell of diesel oil, new paint, and rotting fish-heads, threaded light fingers through the hair behind her ears, and smoothed the faded cotton dress against her body. A body that was young and firm, and curved as a woman’s should be.

For a while she just stood on the rock, listening to the sounds of work and laughter blown from the boats. Then cupping her hands about her mouth, she whistled. Hard, like a man, drawing the sound out and up and down short.

The men looked towards her, and she waved. And when they showed no sign of having seen her, she waved again. But one by one they turned back to work. The beach was suddenly very quiet, and even the wind seemed to drop away.

All right, she thought, all right – pretend you haven’t seen me. And climbing down to the beach, she started across to the boats. As she passed along them, picking her way through the litter of crayfish pots and stretched nets, head bent and watching the sun-baked sand pressing up between her toes, she felt the men staring after her.

They were happy people, simple and direct. Full of laughing gay friendliness, they teased her often, but never for long; first one breaking in and then another, all white smiles and pretty words, as though she were the only girl in the village. This time it was different. The silence and disregard remained unbroken and frightening. It was studied, alien, like something reserved for women who had lost men at sea.

Reaching her father’s boat, the girl hoisted herself over the side. The old man had his back to her and was bent over the open engine-housing.

‘What’s wrong, Pa?’ she asked with a smile; waiting for him to turn; expecting the big sly wink that would place him with her, against the rest.

He turned half towards her. The deep-lined brown face held an odd mixture of discomfort, perplexity13, and sadness.

‘Nothing – the fuel pump – I was just checking the pump.’

‘Are you going out tonight?’

‘Nee, I don’t think so …’ For a moment his eyes lifted to hers, as though he were searching them for the knowledge of something. And failing to find it, he looked away, rubbed his hands down the front of his soiled khaki shirt, and turned back to the engine.

‘You had better get home,’ he said quietly.

Behind the words the girl sensed all she had seen in his face, and the wind that had warmed her on the rocks suddenly cut over the gunwale14, striking cold and unfriendly through the thin dress.

Knowing that the thing he could not bring himself to tell her would have to wait, she left the beach and climbed the grey road that led up towards the shoulder of the headland. The way the men went home to their shacks, nesting in a cluster on the first rise of the mountains. The way Jan used to come to her, singing, tall and lithe, sinewed as a coil of rope. Jan, who had always been so proud of his strength, always so invincible15 …

Until that rain-blasted night when the men carried him on a litter of oars and torn sail, and laid him gently on the kitchen table, his crushed arm draped across his chest. That night a black star had come to rest over Sarie for the first time in all her eighteen years.

After the incident they had carried him to her, because she was his promised woman, and it was a woman’s place to care for her man when he was broken. But he was hurt beyond her aid. He needed the hospital doctors, and they had come and taken him to Cape Town and cut off the dead arm. By the time he returned to the village, he was drinking away his fear of her pity, and so avoided her.

The other people treated him kindly at first, trying not to notice the empty sleeve, but he had drunkenly spat the kindness back in their faces. Soon they were turning away from him, and saying that the doctors had cut off his spirit too.

Sarie had told herself to wait; that her time was when the bitterness had eaten itself out of him. But before it could, he went back to Cape Town, with its easier money and cheap, rotgut brandy.

When she reached the shacks, she turned into the rusty, wire-fenced yard of the first one: a low whitewashed wood and corrugated iron building that leaned back against the slope and faced the sea across a patch of untended vegetables and stunted, wind-scrubbed peach trees.

The gate creaked closed behind her and, even before she had half crossed the yard, the old woman started shrilling, ‘Saaarie! Sarie!’

She sat in her usual place, over the stove; old brown hands gripping the arms of a rickety bentwood chair; jigging herself backwards and forwards. As the girl entered the kitchen – and although it was dark and she needed a little time for her eyes to adjust from the afternoon sun – she noticed that the movement was faster than usual, more excited.

‘Where you been?’ the old woman whined at her. ‘All day you been gone. Gone and left me with no one.’

‘I went down to the town.’

‘Ja. Every chance you get, you go off and leave me alone. Every chance. But you wait, dolla. Something will happen to me one day, or maybe’ – the eyes hooded, the whine changing to a sing-song – ‘maybe something will happen to you. Ja, dolla, and you won’t be here where I can help you.’

Sarie stiffened and a tiny muscle started ticking in her cheek. ‘All right. Like what?’ she asked.

But the old woman was looking down at her crushed black bodice and pulling it straight, all expression gone from her face.

‘Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking maybe … ,’ she said as if to herself, and jogged slowly backwards and forwards.

The girl shrugged, and turning to a small window drew a scarf from the pocket of her dress. Her fingers shook as she untied the coins knotted in one corner, and dropped them into a cracked vase standing on the sill.

‘I took some oysters down to the hotels. They paid me seventy cents,’ she said evenly.

‘Huh!’ The woman was bent on mischief, and struck again, her voice oily and bitter as cascara16. ‘What you want to buy with it? A wooden arm, maybe?’

And when there was no answer: ‘What’s it like, dolla – love with one arm?’

Sarie whirled. ‘You keep you filthy tongue off – ’

The old woman’s high, screamed laughter filled the room, flooding out Sarie’s words on a torrent of malice17 and triumph. She had struck well, and the girl stood glaring at her, too tense with anger to move: oh, to beat the withered face until the eyes mocked no more and the pink gums were still for ever!

Quite suddenly the laughter stopped. The old body thrust itself forward. The wrinkled, vulture neck stuck out. The chin gleamed wet with saliva. ‘Well, you’ll never see him again. ’Cause what he done they’ll hang him for, one arm ’n all! Ja, my dolla.’

Sarie heard the words, and wanted to tell the old woman she was lying, but the kitchen was all dim, and she couldn’t see the chin any longer, and … It was like standing up quickly after bending in the sun too long. You told yourself not to feel it, but you did. And the old sow wouldn’t stop shouting; it was hard to hear when she shouted like that. ‘ … smashed his head like a snoek, brain ’n – ’

‘Shut up!’

Sarie saw the old woman’s eyes pivot to the door; the flapping jaw go slack; the shrivelled body cringe back into the chair, small, quivering, weak. She spun round and threw herself into her father’s arms, burying her face against his shoulder.

‘Get out!’

She heard the chair creak, and a grunting, shuffling, animal sound that ended at the inner door. Then her father’s hand was on her head, smoothing down her hair, and he was crooning softly as he had done when she was a child.

‘My kindjie, my klein liefste, moenie treur nie18.’

Deep grasping sobs shook her body.

‘What was she saying? Pa, what’s happened to Jan?’

‘He’s in trouble, kleintjie – bad trouble.’

She was too late! Her brain hammered the thought: a man must be allowed to work life out for himself, and only when he needs her can a woman help. But when he was in need of her help, he had not wanted it, and now it was too late.

‘I must go to him,’ she said, pushing herself out of her father’s arms and trying to force him away from the door.

‘You can’t. He’s gone, run away.’

She lifted her face up to look at him, her cheeks shiny from the tears smudged against his khaki shirt. And as he put out a hand to comfort her, she moved away round the table, feeling the fight draining out of her arms and out of her body.

In the corner a coffee-pot gleamed dully against the black iron of the stove. She picked it up and held it tight. It was still warm. Holding it close to her, she opened the lid and closed it and opened it again while the tears dried on her cheeks.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Jan – I should’ve told you on the boat – he clubbed Old Hendriks and stole his money.’ The words trailed out, empty and defeated. ‘He came back from Cape Town this morning, drunk when he got off the bus, they say. About lunchtime he went to Hendriks’ – two men were there from the hotels buying mullet, and they told the police Jan looked pretty drunk and – and wild. Well they left and then he … ’ His hand flipped in a helpless little gesture. ‘They’re getting a police dog from Cape Town tonight.’

‘And Hendriks is dead?’

‘Nee, nee! Did she say – ?’

The girl spun to face him. Warm coffee slopped out of the pot and down the front of her dress.

‘Then they won’t – Pa, they won’t hang him!’

And in her mind Sarie was shouting. O Jan, Jan I can help; I can help!

And she knew where to find him. Where he would hide when the brandy wore off, and he could see the size of what he had done. Up in the deep cleft in the cliff, screened by a tangle of shrub and vines, and overlooking the lagoon. A place they had played in: cooking mussels, exchanging first kisses – where he had asked her once, when he was just fourteen, to be his nooi, always. Where …

‘I must find him first,’ she said.

Beyond the headland, the grey road dropped to a causeway bridging the shallow, silted mouth of a blind river. Open at high tide, it lapped back into the mountains, with banks rising steep and wooded from broken shores to twin lines of sheer cliff.

When Sarie reached it, the tide had fallen back with the setting sun, and the water lay quiet and dark as treacle. Leaving the road and turning her back to the sea, she moved swiftly from one rock to another; surefooted as a cat; hardly testing a step before shifting her weight for the next. And as she moved, a legion of crabs scuttled away ahead.

Where the broken rock ended, she jumped down to a thin strip of sand and crossed it to a high shelf that jutted out into the water. Reaching up, she explored the slippery face of the rock, feeling for the finger grips they had used as children. Then she stepped on to a narrow ledge and, carefully, moving a hand, a foot, worked her way to the corner and edged past it. There the ledge dipped into the water and ended.

Taking all her weight on her fingertips, she stretched out her left leg and felt beneath the surface for the narrow crack that cut back into the rock.

When she found it, she transferred her balance, stepped up to a higher foothold, pulled herself on to the top of the shelf, and walked along it towards the slope and the deeper shadow of the trees.

Beneath them the dark was close and forbidding, and she climbed fast, digging her toes into the damp loam, and feeling ahead for something to hold, to pull herself up on – roots, tufts of grass, branches – until the cover broke, and she could see the cliff face towering black against the lighter sky.

The blood was pounding in her temples, and the scratches covering her arms and legs were alight with pain. But she stopped only long enough to draw breath and take her bearings. Looking across at the silhouette of the opposite bank, and then down to the curve of the breakers at the mouth of the lagoon, she turned right and stumbled on.

A sudden, slight movement in the bushes ahead stopped her. Something sensed rather than seen. Breath frozen, she pressed herself against the face of the cliff. But the shadows were motionless and the only sound was the distant surge of the sea. Then she noticed a slight smell of wood smoke.

‘Jan,’ she said softly. And when there was no answer, again loudly: ‘Jan!’

A man stepped out of the shadows. In the half light she could see the empty sleeve tucked into the right pocket of his jacket.

‘Go home, Sarie,’ he said.

‘But – I’ve come to help you, Jan.’

‘Then go home.’

And before she could answer, he ducked behind the bushes that hid the cleft.

It cut straight and narrow into the face, the floor rising sharply over tumbled rock, then broke to the left and widened to twice the span of a man’s arms. Years of storm water, spilling down from the plateau above, had dammed silt against the rocks of the entrance and left a floor of fine, level earth that stretched back to where one of the walls had caved inwards. The result was a rough chamber, open to the sky.

When the girl entered, Jan was sitting on his heels beyond a small fire, his back towards the fall of rock. She moved forward timidly, expecting anger. But there was none. He sat quite still, watching the fire and ignoring her. His face, bronzed and moulded by the glow, smouldered like a coal against the shadows.

At last he looked up. The line of his mouth was thin and bitter; his dark eyes dancing flecks of firelight.

‘And have you come to take me back?’ he asked.

‘Ja.’

The corner of his mouth twisted up and he laughed.

‘So, they can give me money for killing an old bait seller?’

‘He’s not dead.’

Her answer sounded flat and unimportant; but she was alert, seeing every flicker of emotion that crossed his face. As the tenseness went out of it, and his head and shoulders sagged, she stepped past the fire and dropped to her knees by his side.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. There’s £60 there,’ he said, nodding towards an old fibre suitcase near the entrance. ‘I’ll go to Jo’burg, maybe.’

‘They’re bringing dogs tomorrow.’

‘Ja. And tomorrow I’ll be gone.’

A dark shiny object caught the girl’s eye, and she picked it out of the sand.

‘Look – is it one of ours?’

He took the mussel shell from her and rubbed it against the lapel of his jacket, cleaning off the sand. Then he dropped it into the fire.

‘Nee. Ours are all buried under sand.’

‘Jan?’

‘Ja.’

‘Please go back. Take back the money – before they come with the dogs.’ He turned his head to look at her, and she went on, her face eager with urgency, ‘Tell them you’d drunk too much. They won’t be hard – not as if they caught you.’

‘They’ll put me in gaol, nooi.’

‘What if they do? That’s nothing. You’ll soon be out again. Please, Jan. You’ll see, everything will come out right. Everything …’

‘Nee!’

‘Please, Jan, please. We can marry – like we were going to – and we …’

He pushed up roughly, knocking her hard against the rock wall.

‘Look at me, Sarie. Look!’ he shouted, shaking the empty sleeve at her. ‘Do you think I’ll grow another one? Do you think – ’

‘Please, Jan!’

‘– I’ll be a man again? I’m nothing; can’t you see? I’ll never work on the boats again – ’

‘No – no – no!’ she screamed, her anger flaring against the acid that was corroding him, destroying the gay, carefree man she loved; reducing him to a snivelling, selfish dwarf. ‘You won’t work on a boat again – never! But there are other jobs, just as good – jobs that don’t need two hands. Only, you can’t see them – you see nothing but that sleeve. You’re like a crab, Jan. A crab with its eyes turning in – a crab, not a man!’ and then his face, staring at her from beyond the fire, blurred out – and she covered her face with her hands and wept.

When she looked up again, he had left. And taken the suitcase with him. She wiped her tears on the hem of her dress and rose stiffly to her feet.

Outside it was quite light. The moon had risen, full and swollen, and the cliff face, the trees, the water of the lagoon, were painted in a thousand shades of silver-grey. She started down the slope, slipping and falling over the uneven surface, her mind and body numb and tired.

Reaching the edge of the rock shelf, she stood staring stupidly down at the water. There was a slight mist resting on the lagoon, the rock was wet and slippery, and the water seemed to be a long way down.

She climbed over the edge and down, until both her feet rested in the crack beneath the surface of the water. Pressing her body hard against the cold cliff face, she reached out for a new fingerhole, gripped, and swung her right foot for the sloping ledge on the corner. But as she started moving her body over, the foot slid up and off.

She grabbed back at the rock, clawing for a grip. Her nails scratched down the smooth wet wall, and then she was arching backwards, twisting like a cat. She hit the water, face down; and a school of startled mullet broke the surface, leaping away into the mist.

As her head came up, she screamed. Again and again, until the terror and the blind panic choked her and her mind went blank; her body writhing instinctively against the grip of the rock, trap-like about her ankle.

There was nothing solid to dig her fingers into – to pull herself free. Just the water in her face, choking, going over her, beating away from her hands.

Then she was clawing into something, dragging it down. But her face wasn’t in the water any longer, it was up against something hard and firm, and there was an iron band around her back, the hold on her foot eased.

When she looked up at him, he was smiling. Like a kid, she thought, and was angry. Because the taste of fear and salt water was still in her mouth.

‘Slowly now, slowly, nooi,’ he said.

Feeling the strength of his arm holding her, his chest pressed against her cheek, she relaxed her body and the fingers clawing into his back.

‘That’s better. Now turn your foot and work it out.’

She twisted round and pulled. Her foot felt free, then caught again.

‘I can’t. Turn me round farther,’ she said.

But it was caught. She bent her head backwards to look at him. ‘It won’t move,’ she said.

They came early; long before the shadows had drawn back from the lagoon. Three of them. The sergeant, a policeman from Cape Town, with a big brown-black Dobermann, and the girl’s father. Jan saw them coming, up among the trees, the way he had come the day before.

He called to them and his voice was harsh, as if covering fear. But when he spoke to the girl, the fear had passed. He spoke as gently as he had done throughout the night; comforting her against the cold and the beating pain in her leg.

‘Everything will soon be over now, nooi; everything will soon be all right.’

And hearing the way he said it, and the men on the beach, and her father splashing towards them, she knew it would. That the pain of the leg she had caught in the rock would soon be gone – and was worth the spirit of a man.

Post-reading

1.State the reasons for Jan’s rejection of Sarie directly after his accident and also, later in the story.(3)

2.Describe the relationship between Sarie and the fishermen.(2)

3.What are the differences in attitude between Jan and Sarie?(4)

4.Briefly describe the climax of the story and its outcome.(5)

5.Explain how Sarie’s actions link with the theme of the story.(3)

6.What is Sarie’s father’s reason for sending her home?(2)

7.How does the metaphor of Jan being ‘a crab’ affect your understanding of Sarie’s point of view?(2)

8.What, do you think, will be the outcome of Jan’s decision to turn back?(2)

9.Do you think what transpires is realistic? Explain your point of view.(3)

10.Do you empathise with Jan? What decision would you have taken if you had been in the same situation, i.e. of losing an arm?(2)

Enrichment

Debate the following point:

Being self-conscious about a physical attribute can/need not destroy personal relationships.