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The Bridegroom 1
He came into his road camp that afternoon for the last time. It
was neater than any house would ever be; the sand raked
smooth in the clearing, the water drums under the tarpaulin,
the flaps of his tent closed against the heat. Thirty yards away a
black woman knelt, pounding mealies, and two or three
children, grey with Kalahari dust, played with a skinny dog.
Their shrillness was no more than a bird's piping in the great
spaces in which the camp was lost.Inside his tent, something of the chill of the night before
always remained, stale but cool, like the air of a church. There
was his iron bed, with its clean pillowcase and big kaross.
There was his table, his folding chair with the red canvas seat,
and the chest in which his clothes were put away. Standing on
the chest was the alarm clock that woke him at five every
morning and the photograph of a seventeen-year-old girl from
Francistown whom he was going to marry. They had been
there a long time, the girl and the alarm clock; in the morning
when he opened his eyes, in the afternoon when he came off
the job. But now this was the last time. He was leaving for
Francistown in the Roads Department ten-tonner, in the
morning; when he came back, the next week, he would be
married and he would have with him the girl, and the caravan
which the department provided for married men. He had his
eye on her as he sat down on the bed and took off his boots; the
smiling girl was like one of those faces cut out of a magazine:
He began to shed his working overalls, a rind of khaki stiff
with dust that held his shape as he discarded it, and he called,
easily and softly, 'Ou Piet, ek wag.' But the bony black man with
his eyebrows raised like a clown's, in effort, and his bare feet
shuffling under the weight, was already at the tent with a tin
bath in which hot water made a twanging tune as it slopped
from side to side.
When he had washed and put on a clean khaki shirt and a
pair of worn grey trousers, and streaked back his hair with
sweet-smelling pomade, he stepped out of his tent just as the
lid of the horizon closed on the bloody eye of the sun. It was
winter and the sun set shortly after five; the grey sand turned a
fading pink, the low thorn scrub gave out spreading stains of
lilac shadow that presently all ran together; then the surface of
the desert showed pocked and pored, for a minute or two,
like the surface of the moon through a telescope, while the sky
remained light over the darkened earth and the clean crystal
pebble of the evening star shone. The campfires-his own and
the black men's, over there-changed from near-invisible
flickers of liquid colour to brilliant focuses of leaping tongues
of light; it was dark. Every evening he sat like this through the
short ceremony of the closing of the day, slowly filling his
pipe, slowly easing his back round to the fire, yawning off the
stiffness of his labor. Suddenly he gave a smothered giggle,
to himself, of excitement. Her existence became real to him; he
saw the face of the photograph, posed against a caravan door.
He got up and began to pace about the camp, alert to promise.
He kicked a log farther into the fire, he called an order to Piet,
he walked up towards the tent and then changed his mind and
strolled away again. In their own encampment at the edge of
his, the road gang had taken up the exchange of laughing,
talking, yelling, and arguing that never failed them when their
work was done. Black arms gestured under a thick foam of
white soap, there was a gasp and splutter as a head broke the
cold force of a bucketful of water, the gleaming bellies of iron
cooking pots were carried here and there in a talkative preparation of food. He did not understand much of what they were
saying-he knew just enough Tswana to give them his orders,
with help from Piet and one or two others who understood his
own tongue, Afrikaans-but the sound of their voices be-
longed to this time of evening. One of the babies who always
cried was keeping up a thin, ignored wail; the naked children
were playing the chasing game that made the dog bark. He
came back and sat down again at the fire, to finish his pipe.
After a certain interval (it was exact, though it was not timed
by a watch, but by long habit that had established the
appropriate lapse of time between his bath, his pipe, and his food) he called out, in Afrikaans, 'Have you forgotten my
dinner, man?'
From across the patch of distorted darkness where the light
of the two fires did not meet, but flung wobbling shapes and
opaque, overlapping radiances, came the hoarse, protesting
laugh that was, better than the tribute to a new joke, the
pleasure in constancy to an old one.
Then a few minutes later: 'Piet! I suppose you've burned
everything, eh?'
'Baas?'
'Where's the food, man?'
In his own time the black man appeared with the folding
table and an oil lamp. He went back and forth between the
dark and light, bringing pots and dishes and food, and nagging with deep satisfaction, in a mixture of English and Afrikaans. 'You want koeksusters, so I make koeksusters. You ask
me this morning. So I got to make the oil nice and hot, I got to
get everything ready ... It's a little bit slow. Yes, I know. But I
can't get everything quick, quick. You hurry tonight, you
don't want wait, then it's better you have koeksusters on
Saturday, then I'm got time in the afternoon, I do it nice...
Yes, I think next time it's better ...'
Piet was a good cook. 'I've taught my boy how to make
everything', the young man always told people, back in Francistown. 'He can even make koeksusters', he had told the girl's
mother, in one of those silences of the woman's disapproval
that it was so difficult to fill. He had had a hard time, trying to
overcome the prejudice of the girl's parents against the sort of
life he could offer her. He had managed to convince them that
the life was not impossible, and they had given their consent to
the marriage, but they still felt that the life was unsuitable, and
his desire to please and reassure them had made him anxious
to see it with their eyes and so forestall, by changes, their
objections. The girl was a farm girl, and would not pine for
town life, but, at the same time, he could not deny to her
parents that living on a farm with her family around her, and
neighbors only thirty or forty miles away, would be very
different from living two hundred and twenty miles from a
town or village, alone with him in a road camp 'surrounded by
a gang of kaffirs all day', as her mother had said. He himself
To be
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