Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda

Author:Zakes Mda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

UNCLE OWEN HAS MARRIED one of the Bee People and his daughter Nobantu is not amused. I am told she came all the way from Soweto to express her rage, not towards her father but towards the woman. She stood outside the new couple’s house and shouted for the entire village to hear that the woman was a shameless gold digger who was young enough to be Nobantu’s daughter. The elders of the village came to calm her down. They took her to Uncle Press’s general dealer’s store, known as eRestu by the villagers because – just to remind you – it’s both a restaurant and a tavern, so that she could get some comfort and sympathy from her own relatives.

I am not aware of this marriage and its repercussions when I drive into the village. Uncle Owen never warned me about it. In fact, I was not even aware that there was something going on between him and any woman since his misadventure when he was still in exile in Mafeteng: his house was once invaded by the brothers of a young woman with whom he had made a baby. They beat him up and confiscated the baby who had been in his custody for months. I wouldn’t have imagined that at his mature age his friskiness continued unabated.

I have merely come to see the Bee People as I often do when I need a break from my writing. I innocently call at Uncle Owen’s house as I usually do when I am in the village. I notice that he has added another room to the house and there are construction materials in the garden – tools, bricks, sand, and bags of cement. I find the village madman, my Cousin Bernard, pacing the ground in front of the house mumbling something to the effect that Uncle Owen now thinks he is better than everyone else since he has suddenly become rich.

‘Where is Uncle Owen?’ I ask.

‘He’s gone to Sterkspruit with that whore he calls his wife,’ says Cousin Bernard.

‘His wife? He has a wife?’

‘They’ve gone to eat his money. And he can’t even give me ten rands. You know Nobantu was here? He didn’t even give her a cent. His own daughter coming all the way from Johannesburg for nothing. And here he is, an old man of eighty-one, five months and three days, spending his money on idikazi who is young enough to be his great-granddaughter.’

He carries on in this vein and doesn’t even notice when I walk away, get into my car and drive to eRestu. I don’t know why Cousin Bernard is taking Uncle Owen’s behaviour with the woman he calls idikazi, or whore, so personally. And what are these riches that he is talking about? The last time I was with Uncle Owen his sole means of survival was the meagre old-age monthly pension that he received from the government – which couldn’t have been more than six hundred rands a month at the time.

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