Who Killed Piet Barol? Read online

  Impulsively, she hugged him. “This is not the moment to lose heart. You are exceptionally talented. You need capital and a capable business manager.”

  “I’m afraid money doesn’t come when you have ceased to believe in yourself.”

  “You cannot have reached quite such a pass, Piet Barol. It would disappoint me tremendously if you had.” She smiled. “Let me give you the money. Enough for a year of staff and decent wood. You can sell me shares. It wouldn’t be a loan.”

  But Piet, who had seen Louisa have this thought, and struggle to hide it from him all through lunch, raised his hand. He said no in plain terms.

  “Well eat with us tomorrow, then, and bring your wife. I am intrigued to know the woman who has tamed you.”

  —

  SINCE HIS ARRIVAL in Cape Town six and a half years before, Piet Barol had spent a great deal of money. An American businessman had provided him with one thousand pounds and advised him to exploit his European glamour. He had followed this counsel and leased lavish premises on Adderley Street. He had also rented a beautiful house in Oranjezicht, with a veranda entwined with bougainvillea and a view of the mountain and the vast plains. These expenses he did not regret. As he waved Louisa goodbye, however, it seemed unwise to have spent so much in the restaurant and bar of the Mount Nelson.

  For a moment he considered going into the hotel. Its pink bricks spoke of certainty. He knew someone would stand him a drink if he claimed to have left his pocketbook behind. But he had seen many men in these early days of the Union of South Africa disguise their imminent ruin from themselves with alcohol, and so hasten it.

  He pressed on up the mountain, leaning forward as the gradient rose.

  It was two months since the Barols had owned a motor car, and the walk from his shop to his house was wearying. Piet had lost the heedless athleticism of his youth and the challenge of these daily hikes shamed him. When he had completed his climb, he was so ravenous he overindulged in the delicious, fatty curries Arthur’s Cape Malay nurse made, and though his thighs were as solid as the mahogany he could no longer afford, there was a ring of fat around his waist that spoiled the cut of his clothes.

  The Barols had spent their early capital quickly. That they had spent much of it wisely was entirely to Stacey’s credit. Stacey Barol had an instinct for human susceptibility, and even Piet’s first, rudimentary chairs had found places in the homes of prominent citizens. In the early days, making workmanlike cabinets, tables and desks with a team of Indian joiners, they had made healthy profits—more than enough to leave them disinclined to economize in their private lives.

  But as Piet began to understand the possibilities of wood, he had become more reluctant to let each piece go until it was ready. At first his wife had found his artistic standards charming. Now Stacey was alarmed by Piet’s perfectionism. She knew what life close to the abyss of the fashionable world is like, and would not permit her son to share this knowledge.

  Piet did not know when he had grown lonely. At first it had been merely tiresome to live up to an invention; but he had come to hate the Vicomte de Barol, and to wish that people knew him as he was. Stacey’s company and her wicked wit usually consoled him. But today he missed the confidential support of a friend. He found himself wishing he might spend an evening with Didier Loubat, with whom he had passed many hours of hilarious intimacy in Amsterdam.

  Behind the pleasures of the life he and Stacey had made, Anxiety had for several months haunted Piet like a demon. He loved taming wood into the shapes of his imagination. He wished he did not have to sell what resulted; that he could make each piece for the love of the thing itself. But by claiming an aristocrat’s privileges without entitlement to them, he had jinxed his good fortune. He was thoroughly out of sorts by the time his own house came into view, and cursed himself for not having bought the place when the money was flowing. He paused outside the garden, catching his breath.

  And at once he was calmed.

  The windows were lit with a gentle yellow light. His wife sat on the veranda, her back to him, with a blanket about her shoulders. Stacey had a long neck and the carriage of a ballet dancer. He loved making love to her. He loved being loved by her. He trusted her cleverness and her ability to restore his faith in his own value. He felt, as he opened the garden gate, that if he were granted one dying wish as an old man, it would be to return to this house; to one of these nights with Stacey and Arthur; to see them again, just as they were at this moment. And this allowed his gratitude for the present to warm the icy trickle that ran down his spine when he thought of the future.

  Piet had been seen by his son, who betrayed his presence with a whoop of joy and launched himself at him from the top of the steps. The child’s certainty that his father would always catch him banished Piet’s fears. The little boy was nearly six years old and getting heavier. Piet threw him over his back, dangled him upside down by his legs and kissed his tummy, provoking squeals and giggles. As he returned him to the ground, he felt the twinge of pain in his lower back that these acrobatics had begun to inspire. His wife smiled. So many of her friends in Paris had been abandoned by their children’s fathers that Piet’s delight in Arthur neutralized the exasperation that had been building within her all afternoon. As Arthur clung to his leg and tried to climb it, Piet saw that various bills were scattered on the wicker table. He had no wish to discuss them, but in Stacey’s eyes was a look he had learned to recognize.

  “Will you bathe me, Daddy? Please!” called the child, rescuing his father.

  “Very well.” Piet leaned over his wife and kissed her on the lips. “Later, my darling.”

  “But we must go through these tonight. Ignoring them won’t pay them.”

  “We will.”

  He made Arthur’s bath last almost an hour, and they splashed so wildly that the floor was soaked. Piet mopped it dry himself. This took a further fifteen minutes. He sat with Arthur while he had his dinner, then tucked him into bed and read him four stories. He did not wish the child to fall asleep, but his voice always soothed him; and soon Arthur’s eyes were shut, his oval mouth open, his little head framed by golden curls.

  Piet sat watching him for half an hour, filled with love. Then he went outside.

  Stacey was still on the veranda. On certain nights, miraculously, the wind dropped. The tempestuous currents that raged between mountain and sea calmed. Tonight was one such. He went and sat by her and took her hand. For a long moment she did not speak. Then she said: “This is the last time, my darling, my dearest Piet, that we are going to find ourselves in this position.”

  “I hope so.”

  “It must be so.” Stacey turned to face him. “You observe my current equanimity.”

  “I do.”

  “This is not how I felt when I discovered this.” She took from the pile of bills an unpaid customs’ receipt. “If you’d only told me you couldn’t pay it! Every clever woman has something set aside. But you did not tell me, and you did not pay it and now they’ve impounded our mahogany.”

  “Couldn’t you pay it now you’ve found it?”

  “I don’t have the money now. I am almost in a rage with you.”

  “I’m sorry, my darling. Truly I am. I will atone in private as often as you will let me.” He kissed her shoulder and expected her to smile but she did not. There was a softness in her husband that made Stacey reluctant to say critical things to him. She tried to speak without anger. “You must behave like a man of business.”

  “You’re right. I’ll do better. I promise, I’ll do better.”

  And they went to bed, leaving the bills undiscussed, as they had left them on so many nights; and they slept close against one another, as the wind lifted and the house clung to the mountainside.

  —

  “OF COURSE, she knows who I really am,” said Piet to Stacey the next morning, conveying Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts’ invitation.

  “How inconvenient.”

  “I don’t want to pretend.” />
  “You’d better hope no one greets us then.”

  No one did greet them as they crossed the Mount Nelson’s restaurant. Sitting at a table by the window were two of the best-dressed women Stacey had seen in her life, their glamour offset by the somber tailoring of the man between them. She was used to being very grand in the Colony, and took for granted her status as an arbiter of style. Now she saw that she looked like the provincial copy of a lady of fashion that she was. She felt a sudden instinctive hatred of the two women. One had a mass of blonde curls, held in place by a brooch set with a huge aquamarine and diamonds. The other was dark, with a severe, strikingly beautiful face of the kind that was beginning to look so well in studio photographs.

  “I’m delighted to meet you,” she said, taking Louisa’s hand. “My husband speaks so happily of his time in Amsterdam.”

  Dennis insisted on the springbok, though Piet told him it was likely to be tough at this time of year. Myrthe and Louisa ordered kingklip. Stacey, who had not eaten in a restaurant for eight months, ordered a slice of foie gras and the largest of the lobsters thrashing in a silver-mounted tank that the waiter wheeled to them on a trolley. Piet felt grateful to Louisa for the absolution she had given him, and exerted himself to entertain her husband. Dennis was not at all the man he would have thought of for her. In fact, he realized, he had never thought of her as any man’s wife. And though her husband sat across from him now, with his weak chin and sparkling eyes, he still struggled to imagine them together.

  “This kingklip tastes rather like turbot,” said Louisa.

  “How I miss the turbot at the Ritz in Paris,” said Stacey.

  “Do you know Paris?” asked Dennis.

  “My wife was a singer there, at the Opéra Comique,” said Piet swiftly, to divert Stacey from the fantastical narrative she usually gave of her time in the French capital. “We met on the liner coming here.” It was a relief to begin with the truth.

  “Too divine,” said Louisa. “I do hope you’ll give a private concert for us, Mrs. Barol. There’s a piano in Dennis’ suite.”

  In the Europe she had left behind, the expression of such a hope would have been an insult intended to wound. Stacey did not know what to make of it, and her stomach tightened. She had suffered in the chorus of the Opéra Comique, surrounded by women who were worldlier, and lovelier, and nastier than she. She knew the traceless ways in which women injure one another, and looked sharply at Louisa, whose glance was penetrating.

  “I sing nothing but lullabies any longer,” she replied prettily. “I do hope you’ll come to tea and meet our son before you go.”

  —

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Piet said: “You did very well.”

  “You should get some money from her. She’s evidently stinking. She gave me her card.”

  “I would rather starve.”

  The resentment that had been simmering in Stacey since her discovery of the unpaid customs’ bill overcame her self-control. “You may starve if you wish. But you will not make me or Arthur starve with you. It is time to throw yourself on Percy Shabrill’s mercy.”

  “Never.”

  Stacey stood up. With a great effort of will she resisted the temptation to make any of the cutting remarks that were tearing slices through her brain. “As it happens,” she said, “I’ve had a clever idea.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ve done the accounts three times and there’s no chance of us getting to Christmas without fifty pounds. We need two hundred pounds to get our wood back and hire new staff.”

  “How much do we have left?”

  “That’s not your affair. It’s not enough to liberate our mahogany, but it will get us to Johannesburg.”

  He groaned. “We cannot stoop so low as Percy Shabrill.”

  “We can indeed. We are going to get a large order from him, with a fifty percent deposit to be paid in advance. That house he’s been building must be finished. They can’t have furnished it yet.”

  “They might have.”

  “If they have, we must make them repent what they have bought.” She sat down next to him. “Really, do think, Piet. Shabrill’s terribly jealous of you. One sees that plainly in these boastful letters he writes. He wants you to respect him as an equal. If he can establish himself your superior by paying you to work for him, what raptures it will give him.”

  “You’re a devil woman.”

  “On the contrary. I’m your guardian angel. I’ll send them a telegram this morning.”

  2

  Ntsina Zini was choked by Bad Magic. He saw it in the black faces around him; heard it in the white voices barking instructions. Even men who made Ntsina laugh till his stomach ached were somber here. All the sadness in them was lured to the surface by the Pit.

  At its entrance, demons swirled in the orange dust. Spirits shut away before time began. How foolish these white men were to liberate such dangerous prisoners! He thought of the snake-tongued man who had tempted him to Johannesburg with talk of radios and money. To whose temptation he had succumbed—he, Ntsina Zini, of the Gwadanan Zinis, great-grandson of the Great Founder who had led the Gwadanans and their cattles to safety during the Great Slaughter. He had been born in the protection of a powerful Good Magic. And he had thrown it aside.

  The elevator that took human beings a thousand feet into the earth at the Crown Mine, Randfontein, was sixteen feet long and six feet wide. Ntsina was a son of the uplands, heir to forests and hills and vast skies. He joined the fifty-five other men crushed together in a stench of breath and bodies with distaste. Behind him, a man with a morning erection was pushing it hard into the small of his back. Ntsina’s name meant “Laughing Boy” and he had always honoured it. But confinement in a demons’ prison had robbed him of laughter. The dust stole into his mouth and nostrils, bringing the first thirst of the day. It crept into his eyes and ears. He whom the girls had called Enomntsalane, Alluring One; whom they had delighted in kissing because his smell was beautiful. More beautiful, thought his grandmother, than his face. He, Ntsina Zini, had not once been clean since his first descent. Physical dirt placed a strain on his soul. So did the facts of his predicament. He had been at the mine two months and six days and had only three shillings in the cowhide pouch around his neck to show for it. In his misery he had bought three bottles of brandy and two nights with a plump Sotho woman whose jolliness was a sham. On the morning after the second of these he had discovered a furious rash on her buttocks and behind her knees and five days later, today, he had woken to incorrigible itchiness in his crotch.

  Ntsina could not scratch himself in the mass of bodies, and the itch overwhelmed him. He was ashamed of his amusements. From deep within, his truest self told him to go home. Only forests and cold streams could cleanse him of his defilements. But the owls at night that swooped over the men’s hostels, harbingers of doom to those who would die on the morrow, shrieked their veto: How? He had been brought to the Rand at no charge. A third-class train ticket to East London, which was a two-week walk from Gwadana, cost two pounds. Even if he never drank again, never bought a woman’s caresses, it would be a year before he had what he needed. As they slipped away from the sky, and the clamour of chisels on rock sank through his ears and into his brain, he knew that even another day was too long. The Good Magic bestowed on him by his birth was no match for the daily drinking in of demons and their dust.

  They reached the bottom of the first shaft. Already the men were singing to shield themselves from sorcery. Ntsina had no voice for it. He stepped off the platform and went towards the dark tunnel that led from the cavern. He was afraid of it. Enchantments had been laid in this place. They caused beams to collapse and men to be trapped. They broke legs and arms and heads. He was thinking these grave thoughts when there was a shower of sparks in the darkness. High above, another platform was descending. From its passengers came a collective cry, a cry he would remember until his death sixty-nine years later. Eighty feet above the cave’s floor the elevator
slowed, and for a moment everyone present held their breath. Then the Good Magic snapped and it fell until the rock stopped it.

  —

  NO SOUND CAME from the cage. Not a whimper, though the heads were quite intact and seemed to gasp. Toes and feet and ankles and calves and knees and thighs and groins were red, red flesh and white bone. But chests and arms and hands and faces and ears remained. It took two days to send into the depths another platform chained by metal, and guns to herd the trapped miners onto it. During these two days, Ntsina had time to understand just what his Ancestors had done for him. He had been early that morning and on the first transport, kept awake all night by troubled dreams. Usually he was late. When he was late, he was on the second descent. Had his dreams not disturbed him, he would be a mangled mass.

  “Thank you to the Great Goddess Ma, and the immortal Amarire, and my own revered Ancestors, for troubling me last night and seeing me alert for this day.” He intoned it over and over, so the men close to him stepped away, believing him to be mad. But Ntsina Zini was not mad. He was resolved.

  The hostels were locked. He made no attempt to retrieve the second undershirt he owned. With his money in a pouch around his neck he went to the gate, topped in barbed wire; and when the guard said he would let him pass only if he gave him two shillings, he paid this price and did not once look back, lest thoughts of brandy and radios disturb his conviction.

  —

  NTSINA WALKED UNTIL he could walk no more. He had walked through a whole day, and now it was night. He barely noticed when the road became a pavement. He did not see the gaslights on the corners. All that held him was his Thirst. In Gwadana one never walked more than three days without finding water. It was a stream he searched for, and none was here. And then it started to rain, and as it did he found his refuge.

  It was a bush that grew in Gwadana, vast and tangled and bright with thirsty flowers. He knew that beyond its thorned branches was a snug hollow, large enough to sleep in if the plant was thriving. As a boy in the forest he had learned many secret sleeping places. He lay on the grass, face to the clouds, and gave gratitude for the rainwater. It washed his caked tongue and slid between the curls of his head. It slipped into his ears and ran down his back and the drops got bigger as the lightning flashed; and he, heir to forest and hills and vast skies, was cleansed. Cleansed of what he had been and seen. It was a warm night and the rain was warm. He took off his shirt and washed himself with it. Now it was pouring, and he pulled his trousers off and wrung them out and watched rivulets of demon dust run from them. He longed for the smoothness of a goatskin. Only goatskin could keep a man dry on a night like this. Not having one, he accepted he would be wet. He was in the grasp of Good Magic at last.