It's summer in the global north (which is winter in the global south), and for the month of August Literatur.Review is bringing them all together, publishing previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the north and south of our world.

Professor  Nhlanhla Maake is a language activist and senior lecturer at the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published five non-fiction books and more than 20 fictional works in Sesotho and English, several accredited articles, radio plays, study guides, poems, polemical and position papers, and a memoir entitled Barbarism in Higher Education: Once Upon a Time in a University

He hopped into the express train just half a minute before the doors shut. He was breathing heavily and perspiring, weighed by a bag of legal documents that he was dragging on its wheels. He took a seat facing a slim woman wearing a mother-of-pearl coloured dress, like a Brown house snake. She immediately mesmerised him like a bird held spellbound by the eyes of a cobra. He could suddenly smell her brown stilettoes on her slim folded legs, with the left over the right knee, and slim feet covered in skin tone stockings like mother-of-pearl.

Her body slightly faced the window and her three-quarter profile exuded beauty and dignity.  As soon as he settled down directly opposite her, he involuntarily mumbled a greeting phrase. She answered with a brusque hello, as if reluctant to reciprocate his courtesy. He could not make out whether she would be amenable or hostile to small talk. So, he kept his mouth shut and looked out through the window as the train shuttled silently out of the station. The seats next to both of them were unoccupied, so a tête-à-tête was inevitable, uncomfortable as it was.

His eyes descended to the left where the majestic building of the University of South Africa peered down the city as if it was monitoring its behaviour. As the train wormed itself into a tunnel he cast his eyes at the window on his left and they stared straight into the woman’s face. To him it was moving forward, to her, backwards. In the flash of a moment their eyes locked into each other through the reflections on the window pane. She did not blink. Within a minute the train snaked its way out of the tunnel and her image went blurred, but still there, mitigated by the light of the setting sun. His cast his eyes down and they settled coyly on her stockinged knee. He moved them up and they landed on the V which left the upper part of her cleavage exposed to his glare. He fished a handkerchief from his inner jacket pocket and wiped his sweating brow.

His gaze closed sight on the golden pendant with a heart perching on the cleavage, sideways down her left shoulder and followed the string hung on it, down to the handbag resting on the seat, tightly close her left thigh. As they descended along the side of her body up to the left ear, he noticed a miniature version of the heart hanging on the lobes of her ears, as if trying a rope climb into her ear. It sparkled in the glare of the orange red sun. He could not tell the difference between glass and diamond. She pretended not to be watching him, apparently enjoying his timidity. Timid he was.

Giving him respite, she looked at the device which she held in her left hand and for a moment focused on reading the screen. She intermittently flipped over the screen towards him with her scarlet and elongated nail of her middle finger. She watched her, while feeling the discomfort of knowing that his every movement was under the sharp purview of her peripheral vision. He opened the bag which he had placed between his feet and fished out a file. He opened it at studied the notes of the criminal case of the client that he represented in court that day. Handling cases of petty crimes irritated him, but a new attorney who had just completed his articles and was going solo had no choice but to take whatever would bring income and a bit of reputation he could garner, to start with. The matter was part-heard and was set to be concluded the following day. It was an easy case, but in want of something to keep him occupied and less uneasy it would not do him any harm to read his notes. 

The train whirred its way on the rail lines, its rubbery slither belying the 160 kilometers per hour speed. The silent game of watched and be watched continued. The train started and stopped, offloading and loading a few commuters, but their space was undisturbed by anyone, as if prolonging their silent chess game. 
   “Hi,” he said, clearing his throat.
   “Hi,” she said, as if in retort instead of response, staring at her hand device and flipping over the touch screen with her long forefinger.
   “Are you going to Sandton or Park Station?” he asked, after an awkward pause.
   “Park Station.”
   “From there.”
   “Home.”
   “I see,” her brisk answers made him feel stupefied.
   “Do you mind if I ask your name.”
   “Mermaid.”
   “Mermaid? I see,” he said, running out of questions. “I suppose you were named after someone in your family? Do your friends call you Mermaid?”
   “They abbreviate it.”
   “And call you?”
   “Maid.”
   “Interesting,” he cleared his throat again, scanning his mind for the next question and something interesting or witty that he could say. “I suppose you can swim well, given that name.”
  “I was an Olympiad. And what is your name?” she asked, in a rather adversarial manner.
  “Oupa. My name is Oupa.”
  “You were named after your granddad.”
He did not know whether it was a question or a statement put to him. Now he understood how people in the dock felt when he cross-examined them or put an incriminating proposition to them.
    “You must be first child or first boy in your family?” she pronounced, without looking directly at him.
    “Yes,” he paused, and “I am the first and only boy. What do you do for a living?” he tried to parry her questions.
    “I don’t do anything for a living. I live.”
    “Interesting. I wish I could be like you.”
    “You mean be a woman?”
    “No. I mean just live and let live.”
    “Maybe you can tell me about letting live. I have no clue about that part.”
    He felt clumsy. The conversation continued with brisk questions and answers. When about forty-two minutes struck the train shunted into Park Station. He timidly asked for her phone number before they disembarked. She dictated it once and he made it a point that he grasps it without asking her to repeat it. As he fished out his hand device from his jacket pocket to record it, she was gone, leaving him with the fragrance of her perfume and fading memory of her existence, an aroma of honey and roses. It was as if she was never there in the first instance. It felt like he saw a mermaid waving at him from the distance in the sea and then vanishing under the waves. 

That evening he called his fiancé. Throughout their conversation he felt hollow inside, and terminated the call with an excuse that he had to prepare intensely for the final leg of the court case tomorrow. The following day in court he was absent-minded. The court found in his favour but he felt no excitement at all. His mind was haunted by the encounter of the day before. He made it a point to board the train at the same time as yesterday, with the hope of meeting Mermaid again. She was not there. In the next three days he made it a point to be punctually at the station at 18:00. She was not there. He began to doubt whether he really saw the woman or had a vision and an encounter with a mermaid.

That Saturday he had an appointment to go out with his fiancé. He called her and they confirmed their appointment to meet in Joburg, at Maboneng, a lively scene of restaurants and good music. In the morning he took a quick shower, put on his track suit and sneakers, and drove down the road to the car wash. While waiting for it to be washed and vacuumed, he paced around, his mind distracted by the thought of the mermaid. He tried to brush her aside, but her presence persisted with the tenacity of a mosquito. He decided to call her, dreading to sound as clumsy as he did on their first encounter. He was taken aback when she answered the call after it rang once. For a split moment he got tongue tied, but her ebullience on the other end loosened his tongue, and butter melted.
    “When am I seeing you?” she said convivially.
    “Well, what about the Gautrain, at the station, on Monday?”
    “You know what,” she said, with her smooth voice smiling in his ear, “I will be in Melrose Arch in about an hour. Can we meet there for lunch, say 12:00 sharp?”
    “Eh,” he literally scratched his head, “Melrose Arch?”
    “Yes, let’s meet at the entrance of Woolworths, then take it from there. Okay, see you later,” she hung up.

His heart beat accelerated to palpitation. He did not know which way to go, to Maboneng or Melrose Arch. A subliminal play of the rendezvous unfurled in his mind, like amorphous figures dancing on a magic carpet; Maboneng meant “place of lights” and Melrose meant “honey of roses.” When the car washers were done, he paid and gave a tip equal to the payment of the service, either inspired by a spirit of generosity or his confused state of mind. He drove out of the car wash bay with determination to ignore the content and conclusion of the last call. He switched the radio to full blast but the talk show irritated him, because some remarks uttered by the show host seemed to be casting aspersions at the weakness of his character. He switched it off with an angry cluck of his tongue. As he took the ramp onto the M1 to Johannesburg Central Business District, he looked at the digital clock on the dash board. He had 40 minutes to spare between the original appointment and noon. He passed the turn to the CBD and continued on the M1 to the north. He took exit 20 to Athol-Oaklands and then headed for Oakland and Melrose. He turned right into Melrose Boulevard, into High Street and drove into Melrose Arch. The vehicle seemed to have taken control of direction, without his authority. He found underground parking and walked out to the shopping mall.

 He paced up and down, passing the Woolworths entrance several times. He checked the time on his mobile phone. He had about half an hour to spare before the anticipated advent. He kept rehearsing his apology. “I’m sorry that I have to rush home. I received an urgent call from my mom in Soweto …”, but before he completed it for the umpteenth time, soft hands blindfolded him from behind, and the familiar smell of roses tickled his nostrils deliciously. The soft hands turned his faced around and exclaimed in a soft soprano, “got you.” When she unveiled the blindfold, his face was staring at her velvety brown skin, valanced with a thick layer of makeup, extended eyelashes and scarlet lipstick. Before he came to, she planted a gentle but determined kiss on his lips. It felt and tasted like a ripe plum and honey. Never in his life had so many pleasantries converged simultaneously.

When he drove back home, the pleasure of the lunch left a sweet after taste in his mouth, and his nostrils carried a hangover of honey and roses. It did not matter that the bill for the four-course meal brought him close to an overdraft. Fabricating an apology for his fiancé was an irritant which sought to spoil the pleasure of the day. When he switched off the engine at his apartment in Ormonde, his mother had been assigned a number of roles in the changing plot. He did not have the guts to make that call until the next day. By that time the plot was well rehearsed and his mother knew her lines well. The second time he missed their appointment, his mom’s errands featured in their conversation as an alibi. The third time he missed their appointment, his lies were less convincing than the first and second instance. 

And so, the story repeated itself like history, until one morning he decided that enough was enough with lies. Thus, he became a man, once and for all, and sent her a text message, that he was no longer interested in her. His guts did not go so far as admitting that he had found someone better, but simply that he needed some space to find himself. Four years of romance at university were swept down the drain, like garbage washed off the road into the gutter by showers of heavy of rain, with no regret, no qualms.

That weekend he went to his parents in Meadowlands, to tell them about the breakup with his fiancé.
    “Why, Oupa, why?” his mother pleaded, almost in tears.
    “I don’t know mme, I just feel that she and I were not meant for each other.”
    “When did you start feeling that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What do you mean…”
    “No, Mme,” his dad gently interrupted the old lady. “If a man has found new love, there is no point in prosecuting him about time and all that jazz. He feels it in his guts. Here,” he jabbed his flabby tummy with his middle finger, “here. As to when, it is of no consequence.”
    The debate went on, until she hung up her gloves and made peace with what she regarded as her son’s madness. They had their tea with less joviality than usual, and he left earlier than usual. As he drove back to his apartment, his heart was sitting like a heavy dumbbell in his bosom. That night he tossed and turned in bed, and could not sleep a wink. For days the two faces kept fading in and out of his mind, lights, honey and roses vying for supremacy, but the mermaid had an upper hand. It bounced gently on the foamy waves, beckoning him like Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Slowly but surely her lover of four years was inexorably displaced by the new mermaid, whom he had got used to calling My Mate.

Time flies especially when there are many a milestone to achieve. He won several criminal cases, managed to get his parents to visit his newly found lover’s home in Naledi to ask for a calabash of water, as proposal for betrothal is referred to in the decorum of Sesotho culture. When all cultural preliminaries were concluded, the date was set for a white wedding, twelve months into the near future. In the interim she moved in with him and they shared his two bedroomed apartment. Life was blissful, and they seemed destined to live happily forever after the grand celebration of their matrimony.

A month before their wedding weekend and honeymoon, they threw a big party in the communal garden of the estate of their apartment. Friends came from far and near, and no expense was spared in making the Friday and Saturday nights of revelry enjoyable to the superlative degree of comparison. By Sunday the couple were exhausted. When he woke up to go to work, she told him that she was taking a day off. He left her still in the mood of the weekend party, albeit in a state of exhaustion. He could not wait to board the train back home and fall into her slim hands and enjoy dabs of light kisses over his face and tickles under his arms, and all over his body. They were meant for each other, he was the missing rib that Adam lost and regained in the making of Eve, his fulfilment.

After arguing a case of a man who stabbed his wife to death, he commuted back home on the Gautrain tired. He twisted the key in the key hole, expecting to be greeted by the usual laughter and a tight hug. There was no one in the corridor. He did not notice that the mirror on the right wall was missing. He stepped in, expecting her to spring a surprise on him. He did not notice that the Persian runner on the floor was missing. He stepped into the open plan lounge, and had to blink several times to bring into focus the empty shell. His steps echoed on the floor of an empty apartment. The whole apartment was as bare as poverty. When the reality of the situation dawned on him, he went knocking from door to door, inquiring from neighbours if they saw anything during the day. Nobody saw anything. He drove home to his parents to tell them what happened. For a start they thought that he was pulling their leg. But the truth landed when they realised how distraught he was, on the verge of collapse. They called other relatives.

On Saturday morning Oupa, his dad, two uncles and an aunt drove to Naledi, to inquire about the whereabouts of their daughter-in-law. When they arrived at the address that they visited twice to open and conclude matrimonial propositions, they were welcomed into the house by people that they had never seen before. They were surprised, and their hosts were equally surprised to see strangers arriving unannounced.
    “We have come to talk to Maid’s parents,” one of the uncles announced, as soon as they settled on chairs in the lounge.
    “Mermaid” said the man querulously, looking at the woman who seemed to be his wife. He shrugged her shoulders.
    “Yes, mermaid,” uncle Moss replied.
    “A mermaid?”
    “Not a mermaid. Mermaid.”
    “I have never heard of a person named Mermaid,” the man laughed uproariously and his wife joined him. They laughed and laughed, while the visitors kept looking at each other, askance.
    “We are not here to be laughed at. We do not find anything funny,” said uncle Moss, unable to supress his irritation.
   “What do you mean? Isn’t it funny…” the man burst into laughter and after managing to control his laughter, he said, “I have never heard of anyone called Mermaid or Watermuis. There’s no one going by that name in this house. What’s her other name?”
    “What is her other name, channie?” the uncle asked Oupa.
    “We named her Mmatefo, that is her matrimonial name – bitso la bongwetsi,” the father answered.
    “People don’t go by such names here. What is her real name?” the man insisted.
    “Maid,” Thabo answered, “I call her ‘my mate’.”
    “Your maid?” The man smiled. “You are really funny man!”
There was a pause and the man and woman burst into uncontrollable laughter.
    “We are not here to be scoffed at,” uncle Moss reprimanded them.
The man stopped laughing suddenly, like a machine switched off, and roared with a resonant voice which matched his hefty physique: “You don’t come here to talk to me like that in the presence of my wife. We don’t keep mermaids here. Go and look for one in the lake down there,” he pointed in a random direction.
“Don’t talk to guests like that please, ntate,” the woman pleaded.
“How can I not talk to them like that when they insist that there is a mermaid here! Huh! Have you seen a mermaid here?”
    “But we came here to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage,” the quiet uncle explained.
    “We don’t have a daughter, but we have two sons and they don’t live here. It is only the two of us here.”
    “But we came here…”
    “I have never seen you here. Who did you talk to?”
    “There were people when we came here. We came here twice.”
    “Do you mean that we are not people?”
    “I did not mean that …”
    “I don’t remember seeing you here,” the man roared.

Then suddenly it dawned, slowly, to the guests, that the interior of the house was not the same. Furniture and arrangements was not the same. Nothing resembled anything that they saw on the two occasions that they visited the house. There was a subtle smell of honey and roses, which only Oupa could sense, but he was not certain whether his imagination was deceiving him.
    “What is the address of this house?” uncle Moss asked, now calmer than he was earlier on.
    “Banna, and you mme, do you know the house that you visited and saw the mermaid?”
    They were confused and thought they might have got into the wrong house. But it could not be.
    “Get out and go find your bearings. You will find your mermaid. But certainly not here. When you came in, we were just about to leave to visit our daughter in Sandton. We would like to leave now.”

Everyone stood up, and the visitors were the first to leave the house. They ducked under laundry on a hanging line to dry, and walked to their car dejectedly. For a split moment Oupa thought he saw among the clothes a mother-of-pearl-coloured dress, but the image, if it was real, vanished in a split second. They stood outside the yard and looked at the houses in the neighbourhood. They were hundred percent certain that they were in the right house, even though inside there was nothing that they could recognise.
    “Son, I think we better go home and think clearly about this mermaid of yours. Are you sure she was a real person?”
    As their car left Naledi, each one kept asking themselves questions, until uncle Moss asked.
    “By the way, when we came here, what did they say their surname was?”
    “Ledimo, they said,” answered Oupa’s dad.
    “I remember that I said it was a strange surname,” said the aunt. “It was the first time that I heard such a surname, and I did say that.”
    “Yes, you even said that Ledimo reminds you of Dimo, in the Sesotho folktale of Tselane le Dimo,” said the quiet uncle.
    “And when I laughed, you said I was making a mockery of people’s surnames? How can a person be named Mermaid and have a surname such ‘ogre’?”
    “Son,” the aunt said, “where did you meet this woman, at a swimming pool?” She burst into laughter and could not control herself until they got back home.

Oupa was no longer certain whether he had cohabited with a human being or a mythical woman, but the smell of her perfume lingered on.