Thomas Mofolo — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

In the third year after the old registrar of matches died and no house sent a son to replace him, the keeper of the archive, a man called Mahlomola, took upon himself the guardianship of a clockwork mechanism that ticked backwards, and the town below the hill knew him only as the one who read while he walked and walked while other men worked. He had no wife and no cattle of his own, and this the elders counted against him, for a man without cattle is a man without weight, and a man without weight is easily bent. And he kept, in a room behind the courthouse, a device of brass wheels and a single dial, which the old registrar had built to record every courtship of the district and which now, by some fault none could explain, ran the other way, so that names entered were slowly unentered, and matches sealed were slowly unsealed, hour by counted hour.

Also within that room stood the ledger that the young called an algorithmic dating profile, though it was bound in hide and its columns were ruled by hand: the field of the face, the field of the laugh measured in three durations, the field of the cattle a suitor could show, and the field of the mother's people, which alone could not be altered once entered. Furthermore each entry carried a rank, for the mechanism did not merely record but judged, and it judged by a rule none but the old registrar had ever fully known. That is to say, the machine did what the elders had always done in whispers at the cattle byre, save that now the whispering had wheels and a face of glass, and this alone made men trust it more than they trusted one another.

Then came a man named Litaba, who was known in three villages and welcomed fully in none, for he sold what he did not own and promised what he could not keep, and he came to the archive on a market day when the dust was thick and the oxen were lowing at the kraal below.

He said: "Keeper, does the wheel truly run backward?"

Mahlomola answered: "It does, and I have watched it three winters now, and each turning it unmakes a match already sealed, and I have written to the chief's men twice, and twice they have said the matter is mine to mend, since I am the one who sits with it, and I have prayed over it as my mother taught me to pray over sickness in cattle, and still it turns backward, and I confess to thee that I have grown almost fond of its turning, for it undoes what was done in haste, and I have seen three girls freed of promises their fathers made for beer money, and I did not report this to the chief's men, for I judged the unmaking to be a mercy, though I knew it was not mine to judge."

Litaba said: "Then let me mend it for thee, and the price shall be small: for every match that the wheel unmakes, thou shalt give me one name from the ledger's fourth column, the column of the mother's people, and I shall carry these names to markets where such knowledge is bought, and this is the whole of my price, and if thou refusest, I shall walk from this room and trouble thee no further."

Now the true wish of Litaba was not to mend the wheel at all, for he had no craft of brass, but to gather the names of mothers' people, which are the names that carry land and grazing rights behind them, and to sell this knowledge to men seeking wives with cattle attached; and Mahlomola, being lonely and being flattered that a stranger should value his archive above the chief's own men, agreed to the first name, and then the second, and did not count how many he had given by the fifth market day.

And so the wheel turned backward seven times that season, and with each turning a match already blessed with beer and given cattle was unmade in the ledger though not in the hearts of the two houses concerned, and on the seventh unmaking two families came to blows over cattle already eaten, and one man's arm was broken with a kierie in the dispute.

The archive stood afterward with its dial still turning, and the names Litaba had carried away were never returned, and the town said only that the keeper of matches had let a rogue into the room of the mother's people, and this shame outlived the broken arm by many years.

It was in the fourth of those years, with the arm long since set and healed crooked, that the chief's men came at last to the room behind the courthouse, for a mother's people in a fourth village had learned that their name was known to strangers who had never eaten at their fire, and this they counted a theft greater than cattle, since cattle can be bred again and a name cannot. And they came in the number of three, as was proper for such an inquiry, and they brought with them the headman of the ward, and they found Mahlomola sitting where he always sat, with the dial before him turning backward as it had turned for four years, unmaking one match and then another, though by now the town had ceased to notice, the way a man ceases to notice the creaking of a door he has not oiled.

Also they found the ledger open at the fourth column, and the fourth column had gaps in it where seven names had been, and where a name is taken out of such a book, it leaves behind not emptiness but a kind of scar, for the hide remembers the pressure of the stylus even when the ink is gone.

The eldest of the three said: "Keeper, where are the seven names of the mother's people?"

Mahlomola answered: "They are gone from the book but I could not say into whose hand, for the man who took them called himself Litaba, and he told me his price was small, one name for every unmaking of the wheel, and I believed him because he came in a season when no one else came to this room, and because he asked after the mechanism as though he loved it, and I had grown old sitting with a machine that no house in this town would claim as its own inheritance, and I confess to thee that I gave the first name gladly, thinking it a fair trade for a mercy already done, and I gave the second and did not think of it as a second, and by the fifth I had stopped counting, for a man does not count what he has already decided not to regret."

The eldest said: "Then hear the price of thy giving. Thou shalt sit in this room three more winters without pay, and thou shalt teach the trade of the ledger to a boy of thy choosing before the fourth winter comes, so that the archive is never again the guardianship of one man alone, and if thou refusest this, thou shalt be put from the room this same day and the wheel shall turn without any hand to witness it, which the chief's men judge to be the greater shame, since a match unmade in silence is a wound no one may set."

This was the whole of the binding, and it was mild because the eldest judged rightly that Mahlomola's fault was loneliness dressed as trust, and not malice, though the town would not trouble itself with so fine a distinction, and would say only, for years afterward, that the keeper of matches had sold the mothers' names to a rogue for the pleasure of his company.

Litaba himself was never brought before any court, for by the time the seven names were missed he had carried them three districts away and sold them twice over, once to a man seeking a wife with grazing rights attached, and once to a moneylender who wished to know which houses could be pressed for debt through their wives' kin, and this second sale did more harm than the marriages ever did, for it reached into byres that had nothing to do with courtship at all.

And so the wheel continued to turn backward, and Mahlomola continued to sit with it, now with a boy beside him whose name was Tsepo, and who asked, in the manner of the young, why a machine built to record love should be built also to unmake it, and Mahlomola said only that the old registrar had perhaps known something about matches that neither of them yet knew, which was that what is sealed too quickly is sealed against its own nature, and the wheel merely gave back to time what haste had stolen from it.

The mechanism itself was never mended, and no smith in that district ever claimed the craft to mend it, and it ticks still, by report, though the fourth column of the ledger has since been sealed with a lock of iron, and no stranger's hand has touched it again. The town remembers the broken arm before it remembers the names, and this is the shape that all such shames finally take.