The Man Who Owed the River

Everyone in Phola knew that Elias Dube had not drunk water from the tap since his brother drowned in the Vaal three summers back. He bought two-litre bottles from Mama Zodwa's spaza, the label with the blue mountain and the snow, as if distance from the source made the water innocent.

His daughter Zanele did not find this strange. She was nine, and nine is an age when you accept the private rules of adults the way you accept weather.

The trouble started on a Thursday, which Elias always said was a nothing day — not the weight of Monday, not the relief of Friday, just Thursday sitting there with its hands in its pockets. He was replacing a tap washer under the kitchen sink, lying on his back with a wrench, when the pipe gave way entirely. Water came down on his face before he could turn his head, filling his open mouth, and he swallowed some before he scrambled out from under the cabinet, coughing and swearing and gripping the counter.

Zanele watched from the doorway. She had her school uniform on still, her bag not yet off her shoulders.

"Baba."

"I'm fine," he said, too fast.

But he stood at the counter for a long time after he turned the main supply off, his wet shirt dark against his chest, staring at nothing in particular — at the wall where the paint was peeling in one long strip like a bandage being removed slowly.

That night Zanele heard him in the yard at an hour when nobody should be in a yard. She looked through the curtain and saw him standing at the far end near the old fig tree, facing the direction of the river though you couldn't see it from there, couldn't see anything from there except the amber haze of township light bouncing off low clouds.

He was speaking. Not loudly. The way you speak to someone standing very close.

Zanele let the curtain fall.

In the morning he made her eggs with the small tomatoes she liked, and he had already been to Mama Zodwa's because there was a fresh blue-mountain bottle on the table. He looked the same. He looked, she thought, like a man who had misplaced something minor and had then decided it didn't matter.

"Did you fix the tap?" she asked.

"It's fixed."

She ate her eggs. Outside, a neighbour's radio was playing something with a lot of guitar.

"Baba." She kept her eyes on her plate. "What did you say to him? To Uncle Sipho."

The silence had a shape to it. She counted four beats.

"I told him the debt was getting heavy," Elias said. "Carrying someone else's water for three years. It's a lot of water."

She looked up then. He was sitting across from her with his hands around his mug, and his face was not the face of someone who had been crying or someone who was about to. It was just his face, her father's ordinary Thursday face, except that something in it had settled — the way a room settles when you finally open a window that's been painted shut.

"And?" she said.

"And I think he understood." He took a sip of his rooibos. "These things don't need a lot of words. He knew what I owed and I knew what I owed. We were just both waiting for me to say it out loud."

Zanele thought about this. She thought about the way her teacher said words became real when you spoke them, and the way her grandmother said the same thing about prayers but also about grudges.

"So now you're not scared of the tap?"

Elias set his mug down and considered the question with the seriousness she had always loved about him, the way he never answered a child as if the question were small.

"It's not about scared," he said finally. "It's about — when you owe someone something, you can't use the thing you owe them. You understand? The water wasn't mine to drink while I still had that on me."

She didn't entirely understand. But she filed it in the part of her mind where she kept things she would understand later, which was a large and growing part.

He got up, rinsed his mug at the sink, and stood there for a moment with the tap still running — let it run over his hands for just a second longer than necessary. Then he turned it off, dried his hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven door, and told her she was going to be late for school.

She picked up her bag. The radio next door had moved on to something slower now, something that sounded like it was in no hurry to end.

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