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A Sands of the Emperor Novel
by David Brookshaw, Mia Couto
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One day, I'll be like a mole. I'll be all covered in earth, my father muttered, anticipating with sorrow the news he was about to announce.
That'll happen to us all, Mother said.
It won't be long before I leave for the mines. I'm going to do what my father did—I'm going to leave this place and try life in South Africa. That's what I'm going to do.
It wasn't a prediction. It was a threat. He took a pinch of tobacco from his pocket and an old cigarette paper. With surgical care, he slowly began to roll his cigarette. There wasn't a black man in the entire village who could boast of the ability to roll his own smokes in this way. Only my father could. With kingly demeanor, he approached the fire and drew out an ember to light his cigarette. Then, standing stiffly and jutting his chin out, he blew a puff of smoke into his wife's indifferent face. You, my dear Chikazi, insult moles, knowing that it will offend my late father.
My mother hummed an old song, a time-honored ngodo. It was a woman's lament, a complaint that she had been born a widow. Disdained, my father withdrew noisily.
I'm leaving, he declared.
He wanted to show that he was hurt, that his wife wasn't the only one bleeding. He slipped out of his own shadow and removed himself to the great anthill, where, though absent, he believed his family would notice him more.
Then we watched him walk around the house, and eventually set off toward the valley. The tiny glint of his cigarette gradually disappeared into the darkness, as if it were the last firefly in the world.
* * *
We sat there, my mother and I, weaving our silences together in a way that only women can. Her thin fingers scratched around in the sand as if confirming their intimacy with the ground. She spoke with the accent of the soil when she asked:
Did you bring wine from the Portuguese store?
There were still some bottles left over. Are you scared Father will hit you?
You know what he's like: he drinks, he hits.
An unexplained mystery, how Father could reconcile within himself two such opposed souls. When he was sober, he was as gentle as an angel. When he was under the influence of alcohol, he turned into the most vicious of creatures.
It's incredible how Father has never suspected you of lying.
Me? Lie?
Of course you lie. When he hits you and you cry out in pain, Mother. Aren't you lying?
This illness of mine is a secret, and your father mustn't suspect. When he hits me, he thinks my tears are real.
The malady was congenital: Chikazi Makwakwa didn't feel pain. Her husband was puzzled by all the burn marks on her hands and arms. But he believed that her obliviousness to pain was the work of amulets she got from her sister-in-law, Rosi. Only I knew it was a birth defect.
And what about your other pain, Mother?
What other pain?
The pain in your soul.
She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. What soul? What soul did she have left after two of her daughters had died and her two sons had left home?
Was your mother beaten?
Your grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother. It's been like that ever since women were women. You'd better get ready to be beaten as well.
A daughter doesn't contest her elders' certainties. I imitated her movements and held up some sand in my cupped hand, then tipped it out so that it fell to the ground in a cascade. In the tradition of our folk, this red sand was the sustenance of pregnant women. What was slipping away between my fingers was my wasted existence.
Chikazi Makwakwa interrupted my thoughts: Do you know how your grandmother died? She didn't wait for me to answer. She was struck down by a flash of lightning. That's how she died.
Excerpted from Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto. Copyright © 2018 by Mia Couto. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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