Free The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom

which I had come, and on the opposite side at the darkening sea that had called me, and I wouldstand caught in perfect balance in the interlight. In inescapable transitoriness I could have dissolved like a phantom into the swift black. I was marked out in peacefulness, and whole. When a dog barked, I started out of my rumination and breathed deeply, salty air, smell of crayfish, smell of damask rose, smell of clove and broadbean. I could smell the first early stars. For that reason I could not understand why I might not keep my children. For that reason I had to accept that grown children were what I lacked.
    For that reason I felt relieved that I had not yet fallen pregnant again.
    And thankful that I did not belong to the eldest son, whose nature was so utterly different from his father’s, for the stories of maltreatment were not just stories. I myself had seen the open raw weals on the shoulders of some of his slaves, and had stealthily nursed them. It was as if the eldest son took out his annoyance on men in particular – in fact he had no slave girls. Not that he would find need for them in his father’s house, but still I thought it strange. We, the slave girls, scarcely existed for this surly young man with his cane eternally in his hand. He had a blunt way of talking to us when he really had to, for example when he had to ask one of us to pass a dish at table, and he did not partake in the amusing man-to-woman pleasantries of the writers. He sat there shyly, half-leaning on a cushion, nibbling, and all that really animated him was talk about the history of other countries. Then his eyes glowed beneath the thin line of his eyebrows. And then he closed his eyes. The eyelids looked defenseless with their shortcurly lashes when his face relaxed so unexpectedly, and like a child he scratched in his ear with his little finger, and shook his head, and his eyes opened in a stare.
    A good thing I had so little to do with him. To me he seemed clumsy, closed off. A good thing I could never have dreamed I would one day spend such a long stretch of my life in his company: and even after that, after he had shamefully abandoned us and taken along everything left over, even after that I could not fathom him. He had a habit of bumping the slaves, or tripping them and grinning when they fell with a heavy pack of provisions. Maliciously he beat the sanga cattle till the stranger intervened and virtually came to blows with him and wrestled with him. He made me shudder. Whether he left me alone because slave girls scarcely existed for him, or whether he did not dare assault me because I was at the time the stranger’s property, I did not know. Do not know even now. I felt protected in the company of my stranger.
    Distracted with despondency, I accosted the stranger the first time he came after the youngest son’s death and begged him to buy me before I was disposed of at the market. That is what I feared would happen to me, that I would again have to go and stand in that place of shame. I remember how I gestured hysterically, how shrill my voice sounded, and later how tremulous; then I shut up. Too anguished, too tired out by struggling in the grip of uncertainty. Overconscious of being obtrusive, rash. The short interval before he answered was laden with my intensity, my violent beseechings were an indecorous wrangling with his reserve, my clammily waving hands helpless feelersbefore his face, my kneeling attitude a too obviously toadying trick.
    When he assured me I would not be auctioned off, how lovely the flash of transition from uncomprehended relief at first to comprehension and calm. I brought a corner of my garment to my mouth to stifle my indecorously unrestrained sobs, and, to all appearances calmly thanked him while choking on my feelings and wanting to scream and rejoice crazily. Subdued I left him.
    For he came again as I believed he would; but this time there was a motive I could not guess, for I assumed without