E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-912681-62-4
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Jane Morris is from Ebbw Vale and is the editor and co-director of the small independent publisher, amaBooks, which is based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The Silt Path Togara Muzanenhamo When the old man woke into the darkness of that winter morning, it was with a heaviness and fatigue that tested his strength. All night he had dreamt of the calf and slept uneasily. In the windowless room he had lived in for most of his adult life, he did not strike a match but simply rolled the blankets up off the floor, packed sweet potatoes he had boiled two days ago, then slipped his feet into broken boots that he secured around his ankles with baling twine. He licked his fingers and removed dry parcels of caked sleep from the corners of his eyes. Stepping out of the hut, he was met with the smell of wood smoke and the ringing of cooking pots. Darkness had just begun peeling back off the horizon, stars to the west still nailed bright to the black canvas above. There was little morning talk in the compound, men woke and dressed silently, ate silently – walked out in gangs to the work yards, sheds and silos. They walked with only a few words between them until they were stationed at their posts, breath cupped warm in their hands. But his silence was different. It was an enduring bitterness held back in his throat by this life that had shown him nothing but labour, this land that had given him nothing to own, where death had taken those he loved, discarding them over the ridge to the great beyond, their graves unmarked. Adjusting the thick coat he slept in, he walked along with the others – labourers, drivers, graders, mechanics – raising a shallow cloud of grey dust off the powdered clinker path that leads to a broad thoroughfare lined with giant gum trees. The men’s silhouettes grew starker as the stars faded, deep stains of diesel and engine oils mapped across their overalls. In his mind he had planned his route to seek out the calf, walked the land in his dreams, the images of his journey set in a simple sequence: the blue triangular dam that hugged the border of the estate, the wide open jaws of the stone quarry, the solitary windmill in the west. By the time the sun rose, he was completely alone, walking away from the distant roar of engine and machine, away from fields still bright with maize stover – he was far into the lower arm of the estate, his boots wet with dew thawed from frost. The air cleared as he emerged from untamed bush to a wide pleated strip of harrowed earth. Along the fireguard a row of wood poles shrunk into the distance with staves of barbed wire glistening with the music of the sun. As he approached the most easterly border of the estate, the smell of water thickened the air with the weight of growth and vegetation. He scaled the muscled bank of the dam and saw the sky off the water’s surface, a sky cradled by bulrushes bowing into carpets of soft silver moss. He took off his coat and trailed through the grass, his bamboo cane slipping through the dry undergrowth that fell away from the dam’s soggy banks. He would find nothing, no newborn or carcass. * Sitting on an anthill, he rests and eats. The noon sun overhead, his buttocks flat on his shadow. As he sits there, he thinks of the calf’s mother wandering back to the pens after two days of being lost – casually strolling in at dusk, alone. For months he had seen the heifer’s indifference to its own pregnant state, noticed the cow’s gradual dislocation from the herd – the separate task of its ways led by a solitary glare mirrored in his own distant eyes. So when he led the heifer into the maternity pen and watched the cow lay down and curl its head to take its own teat, he knew the beast was damned. And without question, or the need of any summons, he knew that the next morning he would have to walk out in search of the calf, the search bringing him here to where he now sits – his pale nut-brown skin absorbing the winter sun. The dirt road snakes away from the dam for three miles, the bush heavy on either side. Flat-top and umbrella acacia spaced out far and wide. As he walks, the rhythm of his steps crunch and sweep monotonously, his left foot scuffing the ground. Over the years he has watched his shadow thin out to a crippled stain, his gait collapse from its fluent stride to a heavy limp that angles and drags his body forward. How long can he go on this way, he thinks, alone with a body willing him to stop, a heart worn out. Born on the estate to a cold, reticent mother, it was clear to him from an early age that he was not like the other boys – boys who, when roughed-up and white with dust from the fields, were bathed by mothers, their wet naked skin shining like dark polished soapstone. His skin retained the hue of the sand, the blond satin dusk that slipped off the others’ heels. His mother had never married, nor did she ever speak of his father, but from the very beginning everything about his features could be traced back to the master of the homestead: the loose curl of his hair, the deep cleft chin, his cool grey eyes. And yet, even with his lineage, he knows he is merely a product of the place, held within its boundaries with a lifelong bond that will have him die here. And after his death, his body will be carted away to a field not too far from the windmill where his mother, wife and children lie. He thinks of the labourers working on the estate now, the men and women who surround him – theirs is a simpler deal, they have come from somewhere else, know the world beyond the dam and boundary fences, have their own villages, have seen the towns and – perhaps – maybe even the city. Some even know how to read. The dirt road gently curves then dramatically ascends to a broad jagged shelf overlooking a deep bare crater – a wound in the earth a tenth of an acre wide. Here, he does not whistle or call but stands and stares down into the burrowed hole – neither wishful nor expectant, neither wanting nor refusing what he may or may not find. He stares into the quarry searching its depth. It has been almost fifty years since gravel was last carted for railway ballast, yet the pit has not been secured, an iron trailer ripped by rust lies upturned on the opposite side from him. The sweet putrid smell of death rises from naked shadows where the pit comes to an end. Leaning over, he follows the stench with his nose and spots a large antelope, the fine brown pelt collapsed on the scaffolding of bone, the head beginning to moult, the animal’s temple waxy and bald. Apart from that, there is nothing that will draw him in further. Crossing back into the grasslands he heads west for an hour before entering a vast treeless paddock, the sun falling cool and flat over a red sea of knee-high grass, which rolls in slow silent waves. In the distance he can see where the field dips into a shallow valley, where a thin scar of naked earth snakes up to the ridge he is heading for. As he walks, his shadow stretches out ahead of him, slipping in and out of the darkening grass, till the grass thins and opens up revealing a meandering belt of sand. In no time the cool breeze falls thick and settles above the soft ground. He wades through the cooling depths of air hugging his shins, the full moon about to rise behind him. He has walked this path, known its course, ever since he was a boy, the dried up riverbed sucking in his heels, the pale sifted sand infiltrating his boots with the cold deliverance of silt. He knows the calf will not live through another night. Even if it rests sheltered in the grass, he knows the late evening air will whisper with winds that mark the land white with streaks of frost. The silt bed will take him up to the old windmill standing tall on the ridge, the wind-pump’s metal sails turning slowly above a quiet concrete water trough. It is here he believes the calf’s mother may have given birth. But for now he stops, turns and gives his back to the sun – looks down across the field, scans the pastures for any sign of disturbance; and as he stares down and across – he sees how far he has come, the homestead and compound knitted tight into a distant snatch of green, the feeding pens and cattle race almost out of sight, the slaughterhouse swallowed up by the land. He knows time is running out and imagines the calf curled somewhere in the field, head to hoof in a fragile pose new to its delicate life. Perhaps, not too far from the windmill’s trough, he’ll hear a weak nasal low – the call coming from somewhere hidden where shadows of growth lurch over the calf like a protective wing or steady arm. Even as young as the calf is, the old man knows no living thing wants to die out in the open, exposed to wind, rain or sun. Perhaps the calf is already dead. He doesn’t know. Would it be better if it survived, confined to these fields, knowing nothing but the paddocks, the pens, the plunge dip that soaks the beasts’ hides with heavy phosphate salts? He doesn’t know. But walking the cold silt bed, he knows the calf’s mother will be culled – the self-milking brood cow first fattened before being sent to the slaughterhouse. Standing alone – an empty feeling blossoms in his chest then wastes away. The cold air falls dry on his skin, his body locked between the shifting balance of the rising moon and setting sun. In the distance, silos and outhouses of the estate slowly fold into the fading features of the landscape, the homestead’s electric light shimmering like a clutch of fallen stars. All he has known fades out before him. Drawing in a deep breath, he turns away and walks up to the...
