Camagu

By Martyn

Part 1 – The Frost Begins on the Lawn

Chapter 1

At ten minutes past four on Tuesday morning, Ayanda Nkosi woke before her alarm and switched it off. This was her routine every Tuesday in term time, one she kept to unwaveringly, but lately it had become increasingly onerous. Her bedroom was cold enough for her breath to condense in the air, but her instinct to pull the covers over her nose gave way to necessity and a lifelong commitment to being reliable. Ayanda, deep down in the core of her being, believed in herself, and herself alone. This became especially true after Sipho died, when some small part of her decided that relying on others always ended badly. So, she set herself on a path where every step was planned, known in advance, and calculated.

She sat on the edge of the bed and did her stretches in the dark, hands to the ceiling, then forward over her knees, then a slow turn of her neck, left and right; exercises she had performed every morning since her physio had prescribed them to her in 2019.

“One degree stiffer per year,” she said to the dark room. She sighed and did one more stretch. “It feels like a law of nature, old girl.”

She dressed by the light of the passage bulb, a single red-light LED only visible when her bedroom door was partially opened; she wasn’t ready for anything more than a whisper of light, enough to turn pitch dark into shadows and outlines. Letting reality seep in, with only the sounds of the morning and the lingering cold of the night accompanying the attenuated visible spectrum felt comfortable. She had attuned to the slowness of it. There was, after all, enough time for the day to assault her senses later.

As she dressed in the clothes she had laid out the night before—which along with showering before bed, was a Monday night practice she abandoned every other night at home—she buttered herself with moisturiser, splashed spring water on her face from a large ceramic bowl on her dressing table, then went through to the kitchen, where she filled the kettle, switched it on, and made her porridge.

She had a game, which she told herself was an efficiency-promoting routine, but was actually her competitive nature coming through. She had lots of them: lobbing empty shampoo bottles from the shower stall, across the bathroom, and into the bin, unstacking the dishwasher in less than one hundred and twenty seconds, deciding on a movie from her favourite streaming service in less than a minute, and many others, each designed to optimise the time she spent just staring at her whiteboard, thinking.

In this game, the rule was that the porridge had to be stirred, salted, sweetened, and on the flame before the kettle clicked off. If she won, she rewarded herself with one chocolate biscuit from the tin to have with her coffee. She had invented these rules in her first winter alone, reasoning that a woman living by herself in the Karoo required either discipline or ceremony, preferably both. She won most mornings, since she also decided how full the kettle was, but a rule was a rule, and the biscuit had the flavour of victory irrespective of how much she tilted the playing field.

“Nobody sane is awake at this hour, Sipho,” she said to the ghost of the man she had loved forever. She glanced through the kitchen window at the tree under which he lay. “Nobody sane, and me. Perhaps that’s why they call it stupid o’clock.”

Saying things aloud had become a habit, long before it became ballast. She would tell Sipho things, he would grunt, and she would nod in appreciation of his insights. She kept the habit when the grunts ceased, but over eleven years she narrowed it to the confines of the kitchen, somewhere near him, where his ghost sat in his usual chair, invisible to all but Ayanda, but no less real.

While the porridge cooked, she took her torch from its hook and went out the back, across frost that broke under her boots, to the chicken coop. The coop was electrically warmed, drawing its power from a series of salt batteries she’d constructed in the back of the barn, which fed a heat lamp on a thermostat. Her neighbour, Danie van Zyl, whose farm was just a couple of miles away, regarded this, and all her other automations, as the beginning of the end for the Karoo—he was a big block of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, a retired Springbok who thought of farming as a training ground for rugby.

“You have to put your shoulder into it. It’s no coincidence the best rugby teams come from farming countries,” he’d say whenever he could. “Once you let the robots take over, where are we? Nowhere, that’s where we are. Aye.”

Ayanda would nod, and smile, and give him another tin of Darling Brew, and wonder how she would survive in a world of manual labour, just as his wife rolled her eyes at Ayanda, a signal of kinship crossing the slowly healing divide of South Africa.

She lifted the lid of the automatic feeder and filled the drum to the top, three days of feed, with an extra handful, more out of generosity than calculation: it covered her absence with a day in hand. The hens shifted on their perches and made low clucking sounds. Out of habit, she counted them by torchlight, six, as there had been the night before. Satisfied, she turned to the door of the coop.

“Nothing to report here,” she told them, taking two eggs from the boxes, before she went back in.

Sitting at the long kitchen table, she ate her porridge with a spoonful of honey, drank her coffee, ate her biscuit, and hummed ‘Habanera’ to herself. After which, she got up and rinsed her dishes, leaving them to dry on the drainer. Then she walked around the farmhouse, checking everything was turned off, and all that could be locked was secure, a mental tick-box list—one of many—before pulling on her coat and lifting the stubborn kitchen door, which had slumped in its hinges, until it was free to open. As was her practice, she did not turn on the porch light; glancing up instead at Sipho’s unpolluted sky, and seeing its twinkling glory undiminished, she smiled with satisfaction.

Before she left, she stopped in the study, in front of her whiteboard. Three lines of mathematics ran across it in her cramped upright hand. She had spent twenty-three years building the proof that stood behind those lines and the last two trying to write the fourth. The board looked exactly as it had looked at midnight. She had expected this, but she checked it every morning anyway, the way other people without mental lists check that the stove is off when they leave home.

Her VW Golf started on the second turn. It was a diesel, seventeen years old, white gone to bone, but it probably knew the road better than she did, so it had earned her trust. Letting it idle while she opened the gate, she drove through, closed the gate behind her, and then sighed at the prospect of the forty kilometres of dirt between her and Sutherland. The road was corrugated in the usual places and washed out in one new one. She took the best part of an hour on it, driving on the crown with her lights on full beam. Twice a pair of eyes came up out of the darkness at the verge and sank back—jackals, both times. Later, further down the trail, a steenbok’s eyes rose higher and held still for longer, frozen in place by the unnatural passerby.

Eventually, Sutherland showed itself as a handful of lights below the ridge. On a hill east of the town, the domes of the South African Large Telescope stood against the stars, still shut. The town existed for sheep and for the sky, in that order, according to the farmers, and the reverse, according to everyone else. At half past five in the morning, it existed just for itself.

There were a few people and vehicles about: a single bakkie parked up at the co-op, and a light on in the bakery, but the garage was open, because she was expected. They had an arrangement. The boy at the pump wore two jerseys, the collar of the inner one folded neatly over the outer, and while the tank filled he went back to the counter, where his study guides lay open beside the till. He was reading accountancy this year. Last year it had been business economics. He was working through a correspondence degree at a rate of two subjects a year, which meant he had three years left, and she doubted the garage would keep him half that long. She expected he would move to Worcester, where there were enough opportunities to satisfy a lively mind like his, or maybe Cape Town would attract him. It depended on how far from his family he wanted to wander. The garage owner, a white-haired man with more wrinkles than face, and a laugh that could wake the dead, would replace him with another matriculant, just as he had replaced the last one, and the study guides beside the till would change subject and go on.

“Full, Professor,” the boy said, pronouncing all three syllables. “It’s a cold one this morning, neh?”

“Minus four at the farm,” she said. “How is the accounting going?”

“Depreciation,” he said. He said it as if he were mentioning the deceased. Then he smiled. “But I’m getting the hang of it. Just got to keep plugging away.”

“Good for you,” she said and patted him on the shoulder. “Let me know when you’re on the move.”

He nodded and looked at her conspiratorially. “Don’t tell the boss.”

“I think he already knows and I’m pretty certain he approves,” she replied, squeezing his shoulder.

She paid and pulled out onto the tar.

The R354 swept south off the plateau through the Verlatekloof, dropping in long arcs as the dark retreated on the eastern rims. She drove down to Matjiesfontein, where the turreted Lord Milner hotel stood behind its white wrought iron enclosure, a repurposed Leyland London bus parked outside, ready for its tour after breakfast. Reputedly, the ghost of a Boer War nurse called Kate wandered its halls. But at this time of year, she would have been lonely.

The village had been built as a health resort in the wrong century and preserved as a curiosity in this one. The local authorities kept it painted for the tourists who usually arrived on Saturdays and rarely stayed more than a single night. At seven a.m. on a Tuesday it could have been a stage set between performances. She slowed—even the police here rarely ventured above walking pace—until she joined the N1 and turned west, the sun rising behind her.

At Laingsburg the road crossed the dry bed of Buffels River. She passed a pole near the bridge, on which the town had marked the height the waters reached in 1981, when the river rose in the night and took the lives of a hundred and four people, most of whom were never found. The mark stood higher than the surrounding roofs. She passed the pole every week, but every time she found her eyes drawn to it, and even now, after all these years, a little prick of sadness stabbed at her.

She switched on the radio, tuned to an easy listening channel, and diverted her attention with Abba and the Carpenters.

Beyond the town, the Anysberg ranges stood off to the south, dry folded mountains with a nature reserve lying behind them. The road ran over level ground as it followed the perimeter of the ranges in the distance. Invariably, this was the stretch of road where the same two thoughts arrived.

The first was the car, which drank diesel and rattled at idle. She contemplated an electric car, many of which now had a greater range than the whole journey required. Ayanda had read the reviews and done her calculations more than once. The arithmetic always came out the same way: even though it was a five hundred kilometres trip on paper, she found herself dealing with imponderables: paper did not include the dirt, cold, or the fact that the nearest fast charger to the farm was in Worcester, three hours away, and that Sutherland’s electricity gave up too frequently for comfort. An electric car was a city animal. As much as she liked the idea—not just for the lighter ecological impact, but also because of the sheer modernity of it—it was impractical, simply because of where she lived.

This always led her to her second line of thought. She dwelt on this for some time, partly because of the impact it would have on her life, but mostly because a decision of this magnitude deserved greater consideration. She’d been thinking about it for months, years even; once a week, as she drove and muscle memory of the route took over. Should she sell up? There would be no shortage of bidders. And she could take the money, buy something small in Rondebosch with a view of the mountain, walk to the lecture theatre, walk to the shops. She’d be five minutes from her PhD students like Thandiwe; five minutes from a decent library and all the other clever minds. Importantly, she could stop driving 900 onerous kilometres a week like a sales rep on their rounds. It was, on every measurable axis, the rational course to take, and, after all, she was a rational woman. And every week she turned it over and found the same thing lying below the arguments: Sipho lay under the camelthorn on the rise. Graves do not commute, and love lingers in places and on things that cannot be transported.

She put the thought back in its box, as yet unresolved, and drove on. The dismissal felt less like a defeat each time she did it. As age and comforting familiarity rounded the sharp edges of her logic, the debate felt less adversarial, and more like a fireside chat with an old friend. Not yet, not until IT was resolved one way or the other, and then maybe she would think differently.

The Karoo gave way gradually, then all at once, as the road climbed into the Matroosberg mountains. It threaded through the Hex River Pass, and below her the valley floor lay ruled into vineyards, table grapes, thousands of hectares of them, with the peaks above blanketed with their first snow of the winter. At the De Doorns crossing, a small group of women stood waiting for a transport lorry, muddy brown and red blankets over their shoulders, flasks in their hands, and each of them carrying pruning shears.

She slowed, her eyes meeting theirs. They looked back at her with something she couldn’t quite determine.

Reflexively, she started humming a Xhosa gwijo, doing both the call and response parts in different voices, each a mournful expression of regret, while at the same time conveying strength through resilience. That could have been her: carrying shears that symbolised the changing of the seasons. Picking ended in April; the crews that remained through winter were the pruning crews, who were paid by the row. It was back-breaking work, and mostly carried out by women who were paid a pittance.

But for a quirk of genetics that gave her a strong mind and a sense of determination that would not allow her to give up, she might have been carrying some other agricultural implement that scarred her hands and drilled the muscles in her arms until they were ropes. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and watched the women mill around, easing her car past them.

The lorry had not come, but the women were not looking up the road for it. Ayanda concluded that the lorry must have been late every morning, and that its tardiness was no longer worth the trouble of getting agitated. Time is cheap for the owners when they paid by the row. The women, they just had to accept it.

Acceptance, she thought. That’s what she saw in their eyes. Acceptance.

At Worcester the traffic clotted into a moving carpark—a nose-to-tail stream, which was almost intimate; Ayanda felt like she could reach out and touch the nose of the person beside her—and when she got past the town, the road divided into a toll plaza and a tunnel to the left, with the old pass to the right. The Huguenot Tunnel saved eleven minutes off her journey, but a toll was charged for using it, and the trucks, who passed the costs on to their employers, queued for it three abreast.

Meanwhile, the R101 over the Du Toitskloof Pass cost her eleven minutes of her time but gave her a view of the Hawequas mountains. It wasn’t really a decision, rather a sigh of relief to get away from the traffic. She chose the pass.

Near the top, a male baboon sat on a stone barrier with his hands on his knees. He was facing the traffic like a toll collector who had decided collecting the tariff for passing wasn’t worth his time. He nodded and grimaced at the cars as they sped by, seemingly both happy and annoyed that someone was visiting his house. Ayanda smiled at him and drove on, hoping he would get what he came for. She had nothing to give him, but she made a mental note to bring some fruit to toss through her window; a token of her appreciation to the guardian of the pass.

The descent brought the town of Paarl unrolling below her, the granite domes of Paarl Rock catching the light above the town. The R101 threaded into Main Street, carrying her down an avenue of oaks past wine cellars and churches, a three-kilometre-long street that let her out at the far end onto the national road for the last forty minutes of her drive. Table Mountain stood ahead with its cape of cloud, and by ten a.m. she was in Rondebosch, under oaks again, climbing up the gentle slopes to the university.

The guard at the gate knew her by sight, and had the barrier up while she was still in second gear. He greeted her as Prof, just as he had for the previous nine years. From the shine on his boots and the way he stood beside the booth rather than in it—his frame rigidly upright, spine parallel to the wall—she concluded that he had once been a soldier, and, judging by his accent, that the army had been Zimbabwe’s. She had never asked, and he had never offered, and it was to their mutual satisfaction this arrangement was renewed twice a week.

At eleven she took tea in the departmental common room, standing near the door with her cup in both hands. The talk was of the faculty budget, a grant deadline, and the load-shedding schedule. Naidoo from the astronomy side worked his way over to her, as he did most Tuesdays, a kind man with a talent for arranging things.

“You’ll come to the colloquium dinner on Friday,” he said. “Everyone’s asking after you. It’s been, what? A year?”

“The farm,” she said.

“Ayanda,” he said, his voice dragging out her name into an expression of reprimand, albeit a gentle one. “Surely the farm can spare you one Friday.”

“The farm has never expressed an opinion on my absence or otherwise,” she said, not unkindly. “That is why we make such good housemates. You follow?”

Naidoo laughed, because it was the answer she always gave, maybe dressed differently, but he expected it and would have been surprised to hear anything else. Everyone knew. Since arriving at the university, some two years after Sipho’s death, Ayanda had eschewed invitations to socialise en masse. She didn’t believe in team building. In fact, she didn’t think of herself as being part of a team. She paddled her own canoe.

Consequently, over the years, the invitations arrived less often and usually, more gently, the department rearranging itself around her absences the way a river rearranges itself around an island.

This suited her. She put her cup down half-full and left for the lecture theatre eight minutes early.

At twelve, she lectured third-year quantum mechanics to forty students on the measurement postulate. She taught the collapse of the wavefunction the way one teaches an irregular verb: as a thing to be memorised, not defended. A coltish-looking young man with serious eyes, sitting in the third row, asked why measurement should be special, why the mathematics ran smoothly everywhere and then broke its own rules at the moment somebody looked.

“That is an excellent question,” she said, “and the syllabus answer is that the postulate is justified by experiment. Every measurement ever made agrees with it. Write that down; it will be in the examination.”

She waited while the pens moved, and then she took off her reading glasses and looked at the young man over the heads between them. “The other answer is that physics is not finished. You follow?”

She asked it quietly; a classroom habit, a small question where other lecturers hammered a point, and the students learned within a term it was not rhetorical: she would stand there, entirely at her ease, until somebody nodded as if they meant it. The young man in the third row nodded as if he meant it. She put her glasses back on, and the lecture ended on time.

Her doctoral students came after. Thandiwe first, who was the best of them and quite possibly the best she had ever had. The young woman arrived with her draft chapter already marked with her own hand.

“Before you say anything,” Thandiwe said, “the fourth section is wrong. The trace doesn’t survive the way I claimed it would. I found it on Sunday.”

“Good,” Ayanda said. “Anyone can avoid errors by doing nothing. Finding them is the talent.” She drew the chapter towards her. “Show me where it broke.”

They worked through the decoherence functionals for forty minutes, and at the end of it Thandiwe gathered her pages and paused at the door.

“You’re driving back tomorrow? You only just got here.”

“The farm,” said Ayanda and shrugged.

“You say that like it’s a person.”

“It’s shorter than the full explanation,” Ayanda said.

Thandiwe, who was too intelligent to ask what the truth was and too young to guess it, looked intently at Ayanda, as if she were trying to reach into her mind, smiled, turned on her heel, and, clutching her chapter to her chest, went out, holding the door open for the next visitor.

This was a Malawian student, Chisomo, whose mathematics was sound but whose confidence far from it. Chisomo needed the same forty minutes spent differently. So, she coaxed belief into the young woman. And as her name suggested, she accepted it with good grace, nodding in agreement with each supportive comment. At the end, she stood and said, “Thank you, professor. I feel much better about it now.”

Ayanda saw something of herself in the young Bantu woman. She was invariably correct in her insights and incredibly hard-working, but unlike Ayanda, she lacked the self-confidence to back up her conclusions and drive them forward. Dragging Chisomo across the line was a labour of love. Ayanda really liked her and so wanted her to succeed, but in the end, she had to find her own feet.

At two, she bought a sandwich and ate it on a bench below the Jameson steps, looking down over the rugby fields to the flats and the distant line of the Hottentots Holland, while the pigeons conducted their negotiations around her feet. She found herself, halfway through the sandwich, calculating the hour she would reach the farm gate tomorrow if the seminar ended on time. The longing was getting stronger, she thought. Home, silence but for the movements of the house, only herself for company—excepting the all-pervading presence of Sipho—and routine, all felt like the last piece in a jigsaw: complete. She checked her watch, tossed the remnants of her sandwich to the pigeons and made her way across the campus to her car.

The afternoon she gave to shopping, which she did the way she did everything, from a list. Whiteboard markers, black, a box of ten, because the farm was a long way away from anyone who stocked them. Printer paper. Batteries for the stoep torch. Rooibos. Then food: samp and sugar beans, onions, and the few things the week required. The teller at the till turned the box of markers over.

“You’re a teacher, Ma?” the gangly young woman said.

“Of a kind,” she said, reaching for her credit card.

“My daughter wants to be a teacher,” the woman said, “Grade eleven. She’s clever, but clever with the talking, you know?”

“Then she is halfway there,” Ayanda said. “The other half is knowing when to stop, but no one teaches that part. Tell her a professor said so.”

The teller laughed and packed the pens in with the beans, and Ayanda carried the bags out under the oaks to the Golf and drove to her flat in Rondebosch; two rooms on the third floor, which they’d bought in the years when Sipho still worked in the city, and she kept afterwards because selling it required decisions she didn’t want to make. Besides, it saved her from paying for a hotel or taking early retirement, neither of which filled her with joy.

Feeling hungry, she put the samp and beans in the pressure cooker with an onion and let the kitchen fill with its smell, and when it was done, she stirred in a knob of butter, the way her mother-in-law had made it. Sipho’s mother considered the butter an essential. She had firm views on many culinary topics. Pepper had to be cracked,, not ground, unlike chillies, which could be fresh and whole or ground to a fine red powder; oil wasn’t usable until it was smoking; vegetables had to have enough firmness to make biting a task worth doing; there were many more.

Ayanda, who disputed most absolutes, had never disputed her mother-in-law’s edicts on cooking. She ate umngqusho at the small table with a journal article propped against the fruit bowl, reading the same page three times, before giving up.

At half past seven she telephoned her mother in Middelburg. There had been no rain. Her cousin’s daughter’s wedding had grown by another thirty guests and lost its second venue. Her mother told the story about the church bazaar that she had told the week before, and Ayanda let her tell it, because the story itself was not the point; it was the telling.

“And are you eating?” her mother said.

“I am eating umngqusho at this very moment,” she said, which was almost true, and her mother said, “Good,” convinced as she was that Ayanda was getting too skinny. Ayanda thought she was ten pounds overweight.

“And when are you coming home?” Each word carrying its own punctuation. Home meant Middelburg. Ayanda said December. She said this every week, and as term ended and the university closed its gates, she would make the fifteen-hour drive, stopping on the way at any convenient hotel where she would ring her mother to assure her of her safety.

After putting her phone down, she washed the dishes, laid out the next day’s clothes, and got into bed on her side of it.

“Goodnight, Sipho,” she said to the dark room.

She slept without dreaming, as she always did in the city. Dreams did not seem to carry this far from the farm.

At ten the next morning she gave the honours seminar on foundations, twelve students around one table, Bell’s theorem on the handout. It was her favourite hour of her working week. Near the end, a girl with a shaved head put down her pen and asked, directly, what Ayanda herself believed the wavefunction was doing when nobody measured it.

“Belief is for church,” Ayanda said, and the table laughed.

“That’s not an answer, Prof.”

“No,” Ayanda agreed. “It is not, but I cannot tell you what no one knows. Only priests and politicians do that.”

The girl nodded, looked Ayanda squarely in the eyes, and said, “Will anyone ever find out?”

“One day,” Ayanda replied, thinking of her whiteboard and the unfinished equation. “There are many working on just that problem.”

With that, she gathered her papers and closed the seminar two minutes early. The girl wrote something in her notebook, but Ayanda couldn’t see what it was. Instead, she made her own mental note to watch the girl’s progress.

The Golf was already packed. She had loaded it before the seminar, so that she could leave from the seminar door with nothing between her and the road. By one o’clock the city was in her mirrors, and the road ran the film backwards: Main Street and the oaks, the pass with the afternoon sun full on the Hawequas and the baboon gone from his post, Worcester, the Hex River Valley greying towards four as the winter dusk came down among the vines. The pruning crews were walking out to the road as she passed, their day’s rows behind them. Somewhere past the top of the pass she felt the week’s weight leave her shoulders, as if the city’s gravity had a border she had just crossed, and she caught herself driving five kilometres an hour faster than was wise for the Golf’s age, but she did not slow down.

At Matjiesfontein the lamps were lit again, or perhaps they never went out. The R354 climbed the escarpment in the dark, and with every kilometre the towns fell away behind her and the stars strengthened, until past Sutherland, on the dirt, the headlights made the only human light in any direction, and the Milky Way stood up ahead of her like weather. The domes on the ridge were open now, doing their work of mapping the visible universe. Forty more kilometres to go, she thought. Jackals twice blinked their eyes again. She reached the gate, opened it and closed it behind her with a sigh.

The hens were on their perch in the red glow of the lamp, and the feeder was still two days from empty. The house was cold and entirely quiet. She put the kettle on and did not lay a fire, because warmth made her sleepy and there was work to do. Carrying her tea into the study, she stood in front of the whiteboard while the house settled audibly into the night. Three lines, exactly as she had left them. Somewhere out in the dark, forty metres beyond the window, a frost was beginning on the lawn.

She took off her reading glasses and looked at the three lines the way she looked at students.

“You follow?” she asked the empty study.

The fourth line did not answer. Uncapping a new marker, she worked until midnight anyway. The following day, Thursday, she divided the day between the farm accounts and the proof. On Friday, the proof took the accounts’ share as well; the week closed, and another opened on the same timetable. Term time, the road, the flat, umngqusho, December promised to her mother, goodnight said to the dark. The pattern held, as it had held for eleven years, and she had come to trust it.

It held until the last Tuesday of June, when she came down to the kitchen and saw the man standing on her lawn.