finding myself alone, finding this shattered bottle welded to my palm, I ventured out, saw my husband half dead on the floor, saw by the light of my lamp the blood on the walls; that I proceeded then into my children’s room, saw that their nurse was gone, saw the doors open, saw all the doors of the house open, saw the wind and rain flying in—saw my children’s beds empty, but no: no, there I was mistaken, for there is no precedent for it, it has never been heard of, such monstrosities cannot be entertained. I was mistaken when I thought my twins were gone; my son, Matthew, my daughter, Kit. They were safe all the time, dear policeman. My husband’s lifeblood had to be washed from the walls, and I am the woman who did it; but no, in this matter of my twin children, I was mistaken. I must be. You cannot bear it, otherwise, your official burden is too great. For if they are really missing, you must track them now, in the fractured light of the day after the storm: the country awash, the mud sliding, the fords in flood … Anna broke away from them, from the supporting restraining hands, and walked alone in the gardens, red mud caking her bare legs, her arms wrapped across her chest, walking, walking, while living creatures scattered from her feet.
It was nine o’clock that morning when Anna found her daughter. The party on the stoep saw her stumble toward them, holding in her arms what they believed to be a baby’s corpse. They saw her approach them through a shivering silver light: like a woman breaking through sheets of glass, like a woman plowing through mirrors. One child in her arms, but only one: plucked from the snake-seething ditch, plucked from muddy-brown water, blood- caked, rigid, frozen. Hands reached out again—to pull into the circle of humanity the bereft woman, the tiny carcass.
“Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Salome moaned. “That God in all his goodness should send this trouble to you.”
But then the child began to utter: not to cry, but to make a jarring, convulsive, sucking sound, louder and louder with each breath, as if her tiny ribcage were an uncoiling spring.
EIGHT
After a month Ralph wrote to his uncle James:
There is no news. If in two weeks there is still no news we are to return to England. After all, they say, they can carry on the search without us—and they will carry it on, and thoroughly, I have confidence in that, if in nothing else. Still, I dread the thought of leaving here, because the day we leave we will be admitting to ourselves that there is no hope.
I am much better than when I wrote last. I was “lucky,” the doctor said. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. Anna and I, we dislike being in different rooms now, and we never let Kit out of our sight. The same doctor who told me I was lucky said that this was a shock reaction and it would wear off, and that we must expect to find in ourselves certain oddities of behavior, jump at any noise, suffer nightmares, and so on. I don’t suffer nightmares, because I don’t sleep.
I feel I am living in an alien world now. I know that is one of those phrases that your brain reaches for when it’s tired, but I can’t think of any other way to express it. To be more exact I feel that I am suspended, that I am like someone hanged, that the ground has been dug out from under me, or my support kicked away. This woman, Felicia, the children’s nanny, how could she do it? There is no doubt that it was planned. I must have told you in my earlier letter that Felicia had packed her clothes—everything in her room was gone. The two men brought a truck— the police found the tire tracks. And Felicia stayed in the house that night, whereas for some months she had been in the habit of going back to her own room as soon as the twins were settled. I thought it was the storm that made her want to stay by the fire—but she was staying for another purpose. If I had not let the men in, she would have let them in. I suppose that might be some comfort to me. But then, it isn’t. There is no comfort. I am the one who opened the door to them. They said they wanted shelter. I decided to do a good action, and by it my life has been split open and destroyed.
James, can you please explain to my mother and father and to Emma what we think has happened—I mean, can you explain to them that it is not likely Matthew has been taken for ransom? I can’t write it in a letter. Besides, people in England wouldn’t believe that crimes of such a nature occur. I would not have believed it myself, but when we were in Elim our doctor, Koos, told me one day about medicine murders. So when I asked the police why anyone would take my boy—and they told me—I knew I should believe them. They don’t know how many children are stolen in a year and sold to the witch doctors. Sometimes children, older children, wander into the bush. The disappearance is not reported because there is no one to report it to. These children never come back. Perhaps animals kill them, or they starve. That is possible, of course.
Anna believes that Matthew may still be alive, and that is what she fears most. She says “If he is dead, he is not suffering now.” But she is not sure. There is not a moment when we can be sure of anything.
There is of course a hope, a possibility, that the police will arrest these people. After all, we can identify Felicia and Enock, though I could not swear to recognize the man who stabbed me. If they are caught, perhaps they will tell us what happened to Matthew, but I am given every reason to doubt it. When these cases come to court no one will ever give evidence. They are too afraid of the witch doctors, I am told. If they are caught, they will probably be hanged. That matters nothing to me, one way or the other. I have no feelings about it. I would only want them to speak—so that I can know, so that we can know our little boy is dead, so that we can mourn for him. It is hard to mourn when there is no body to bury. I think—I try to imagine—how many people have said that in the history of the world. But most of them have entertained some hope, I suppose, whereas we must accept that there probably never will be a funeral. In these cases the police never find an identifiable victim. One man said to me, “Sometimes we find traces.” I asked him what he meant by traces, and he said, “Substances, in bottles and jars.”
Why was Kit spared? They wanted the boy, that’s clear. They could have taken and killed her too, but perhaps there would have been no money in it for them. It seems a strange impulse of grace, to lay a baby down in a ditch, with a storm raging. She could have drowned in that ditch, or have died of cold before we found her, or have been savaged by an animal. It seems to me that she has been selected for life, and her brother for death. I shall always have to think about this. And I do not think the years that pass will make it easier to understand. Do you?
Kit is a strong child. She cries a lot now—for her brother, we suppose—but she is too little for us to explain anything to her. It is a blessing, in a way—you see that I am looking very hard for blessings, James. She will never remember what has happened. We mean never to tell her. Because how, in God’s name, would we begin? I want you to impress this, to impress this very strongly, on my mother and father and on Emma, that as Kit grows up she must be protected from knowledge of this horrible thing. If she learns about it, it will contaminate her life.
I wish we had never left England. I do not believe that any good we have done here can compensate for a hundredth part of what we have suffered, and for what we will suffer as our lives go on. It seems to me impossible that we will ever lead lives like other people, or that anything ordinary and normal and safe will ever be within our reach again.
Don’t advise me to pray, because I don’t feel that prayers meet the case. I wonder about the nature of what I have been praying to. Before now I have looked at the world and I have seen no compelling evidence of the goodness of God, but I chose to believe in it, because I thought it was more constructive to do so. I thought that not to believe in it was a vote for chaos. I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern. But where is the pattern now? We’ve tried blaming ourselves, but we are not very convincing at it. If I had dealt earlier with this man Enock, if Anna had not insulted him … if I had not opened the door. I accept
