Thomas Mofolo — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 2

In the year that the trading store at Thaba-Bosiu changed its third owner, a ledger was opened upon the counter, and it was written in a hand that did not tremble. This is the first thing that must be told: that the book recorded cattle, and salt, and blankets, and the debts of men who came down from the mountain with nothing but their names. And it is also to be told that among the entries of that year there was one line struck through so heavily that the paper had worn thin beneath the ink, as though the hand that erased it wished the erasure itself to be read as a second debt.

Ntsane the scholar walked much, and read more, and it was his custom to walk into the old stores of the district and ask the keepers for their books, not to buy but only to look upon them, for he said that a ledger is the truest praise-poem of a people, since it does not flatter. He came upon this book in the third generation after it was written, and he found the erased line, and he could not read it, and this troubled him after the manner of a man who has lost one tooth from an otherwise perfect set.

Lehlohonolo, who kept the store then, and who was quick with his hands and quicker with his tongue, saw the scholar bent over the page and said to him, "What is it that the old men's book withholds from thee?"

Ntsane answered, "There was a debt here, and it has been rubbed away, and the rubbing was not done by damp nor by mice, for those leave a stain, and this leaves none. A man's hand did this, and did it with care, as a man washes blood from a blanket before his wife returns."

"And what is that to thee," said Lehlohonolo, "seeing that the debt, whatever it was, is a hundred years paid or a hundred years lost, and either way it does not enter thy stomach nor mine?"

Then Ntsane made the long answer, for it is the manner of scholars to answer at length even short questions, and he said that a debt erased is not a debt paid, that the ledger of the traders had three columns, one for the goods given, one for the goods returned, and one for the names of the witnesses, and that in this line all three had been touched, so that the debt, the payment, and the witness were removed together, which is not the work of forgetfulness but of shame. And he said further that he had counted, going backward through the book, three other places where the same hand had done the same erasure, always upon a Thursday, always in the entries concerning one family, the family of the headman's second wife.

Then Lehlohonolo named the price. He said, "I will find thee the name beneath the erasure, for I know the old clerk's daughter, and she has his other books at home, uncounted, in a chest; but thou wilt owe me for it two things, first three months of thy stipend, and second thy silence before the magistrate concerning what is found; and if thou wilt not pay these two things, let the matter rest, and I will trouble thee no further."

The scholar's true wish was not to know the dead man's name but to be the one man in the district who had made a ledger speak; this is the whole of his motive, and it is not a noble one.

In the room above the store, where the present owner has fixed to the wall a small black sensor that watches without blinking, day and night, recording all who enter and all who leave, the old ledger now stands upon a shelf, unopened, and the little eye counts the dust that gathers on it, faithfully, and calls it nothing. But before that dust had begun to gather, before the ledger had come to rest on any shelf at all, there was Ntsane.

Ntsane paid the two things that were asked of him, and this is the manner in which he paid them: he sent word to the trading company that his stipend for three months should pass to Lehlohonolo's hand and not his own, and he swore before no magistrate, for none was near, but before Lehlohonolo himself, with his palm upon the ledger's cover, that he would carry to no official ear whatever the chest revealed. And Lehlohonolo, having received the first payment and the promise of the second, went that same evening to the house of the old clerk's daughter, who was by then an aged woman, and he did not tell her the whole truth of why he came, for it was not his custom to tell the whole truth to anyone, and this omission is the third thing that must be counted against him, beyond the two already named.

The old woman's chest held eleven books, and of these, three answered to the years that Ntsane had marked. And in the third book, which was not a ledger of the store but a private accounting kept by the old clerk for himself, apart from the eyes of his masters, there was a name, and the name was Marabe, and beside it a sum, and beside the sum a single word which was not a word of debt but a word of kinship, so that it could be read two ways, either that Marabe owed the store four heifers, or that four heifers had been given for Marabe, as bride-cattle are given.

Then Ntsane understood, though understanding brought him no gladness, that the second wife of the headman of that time had been Marabe, and that Marabe had come to the headman's house not as other wives came, with feasting and the driving of many cattle before the eyes of the whole village, but quietly, and that the four heifers recorded were not the full bride-price but a remainder, paid in secret, to close a debt that the headman owed the girl's father for reasons the private book did not give. And the erasure in the public ledger, made on a Thursday, in the same hand each time, was the work of the clerk himself, who had been ordered, or had chosen, to strike from the record kept before the whole district what remained legible only in the record he kept for his own eyes: that the second wife had been purchased not out of love nor even out of the ordinary hunger of chiefs for many wives, but to settle a shame that could not be spoken before witnesses.

Here the scholar's flaneur's pride, which had carried him this far, met its proper deflation. He had wished to be the one man who made a ledger speak, and the ledger had spoken, and what it said was not a mystery worthy of the walking and the reading and the payment of three months' stipend, but only the oldest and smallest of griefs, that a woman was moved from one household to another to pay for something her father had done or failed to do, and that the men who arranged it were ashamed enough to want the arrangement rubbed from the page, though not ashamed enough to refuse the heifers. That is to say, the scholar had spent his silence and his wages to learn that shame, once bought, asks always for a second concealment, and that the second concealment is cheaper than the first.

Lehlohonolo, for his part, gained three months of another man's stipend and the private knowledge that scholars will pay well for very little, and this knowledge he did not waste, for in the years following he sought out two other ledgers in two other stores, and to two other walking men he sold two other silences, and of these transactions nothing further need be told here, since they followed the same pattern and yielded the same small griefs.

The old ledger was returned to its shelf, and the erasure was left as it had been left for a hundred years, unfilled, for Ntsane did not write the name Marabe into the worn place, saying that a debt once rubbed away by a fearful hand should not be restored by an idle one, and that the paper itself, having grown thin, would not bear new ink without tearing.

In the room above, the sensor upon the wall continued to watch, and it counted the comings and the goings of the store's few customers, and it counted the dust that settled again upon the ledger's cover after Ntsane's hands had disturbed it, and it recorded all of this faithfully into a small machine memory that no clerk would ever erase on a Thursday or on any other day, for it does not know shame, and therefore does not know how to hide it. And this is the whole of the matter: that the old erasure guarded a grief too small to justify its own hiding, and the new watching guards nothing at all, having nothing yet to be ashamed of.