Maja Kriel’s second collection of short
fiction, Primal Night, revolves around the theme of travels and journeys. In
many of these stories a journey away is the pivot around which the action turns
– small realisations come to pass, lives change through these revelations, or a
sort of acceptance is achieved. These are also, for the most part, stories told
from the viewpoint of a woman in mid life – in many the husband is absent,
victim to a cruel disease while in the prime of life, an absence dearly missed,
but an absence the women in these stories have accepted and grown accustomed
to.
At times, however, the similarity of the
circumstances of the departed husband means the stories blur and it feels as it
if we are reading about one woman struggling through the vicissitudes that fate
has thrown at her.
The women, are for the most part alone,
living out widowhood, although in The
Door of Life, the widow has found another man to take the husband’s place.
In this story, the depiction of love and intimacy between is tender,
matter-of-fact, and its description to be applauded in a time when so much of
our art – from films to literature – depicts only young love in its myriad
forms.
This story, a stand-out, moves across
time and memory. The unnamed female narrator recalls her marriage to Zack, now
gone, while simultaneously taking pleasure in the comfort of her relationship
with “the old man (who) shares my bed”. There’s
an awareness of time’s passing and how it’s taken root, in language that is
vividly poetic: “My life tells its story on my face, left its spoor on my skin
where I have laughed or frowned....Nature, no longer interested in my beauty,
bleaches out its colour.” The old man, meanwhile, has “curiously smooth skin,
plump and unblemished. ... His stomach is somewhat puffed and falls into
cherubic folds.”
Back in the old days she and Zack would
cross the borders of the “puritan country” to gamble and spend time in casinos
where this was allowed. Children were conveniently left at home, while Zack
gambles and the woman grows bored and then listless from the lack of attention.
The woman recalls Georgio, “a pirate of other men’s wives without remorse or responsibility”. And, also without remorse or responsibility
the woman enters into a purely physical affair with this man; but there are
lessons learned, “And I realised that the most ardent affairs of the heart
happen in dark corridors, last half an hour, but endure a lifetime.” This story
is a beautiful mediation of life, and the losses that accrue as we grow older
and the necessary and yet quiet acceptance of the withering of the branches.
In ‘Horizon’ we witness the slow anguish
of widowhood as the unnamed female narrator comes to terms with the loss of her
husband and the story contains some of the most vivid descriptions of grieving.
“I spent the first few weeks unwashed and undressed, looking at photographs
through a magnifying glass. It was the detail of life that I needed: the green
flecks of an eye, the grizzled hairs of a moustache that matched the grizzled
eyebrows, the engorged veins on a leg from a lifetime of standing... I didn’t
want to be seen or recognised. I felt conspicuously different, as though my
experiences were immediately obvious on my face like a disfigurement.” But
redemption of a complicated sort (and isn’t life so often complicated), comes
later on, as the narrator meets up again with Johnny, a younger man she once
knew.
In ‘Last Holiday’ we again return to the
theme of the husband dying too soon and the agonising acceptance of that.
Marianne and Mordechai take a last trip when they finally accept that his years
are running out. Intriguingly, and
interesting the story again moves through narrative time zones as Mordecahi’s
childhood in an isolated village is described, one of the few Jews in that
place, while describing events of the current time as Marianne and Mordechai’s
time together runs out. Another meditative, quietly contemplative piece in
which an attempt is made at coming to terms with the life’s realities and
losses.
The final story, ‘The Swamp’ is another
stand-out in the collection. It takes place in Botswana and is narrated by a
man called Charlie. Familiar and intimate in tone – but the story he tells cuts
close to the rough justice of life in an isolated post. A black man is accused
of a crime – and a cruel lack of justice takes place that cuts into the heart
of attitudes in that place. A shocking, and yet achingly powerful story that
haunts and leaves you shuddering long after the initial reading of it.
(Published in Pretoria News, October 24, 2013)
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