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Fiction General

The Water Man's Daughter

by (author) Emma Ruby-Sachs

Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Initial publish date
Jun 2012
Category
General, Suspense, Crime
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780771047718
    Publish Date
    Jun 2012
    List Price
    $17.99

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Description

An accomplished, hard-hitting debut novel that marries a page-turning plot with the stories of three women, each of whom is struggling with decisions that will change the course of her life.

The violent death of a Canadian water company executive in a black township of Johannesburg throws together a South African anti-privatization activist and the water executive's daughter, Claire, who arrives suddenly from Canada desperate to understand her father's death. The murder investigation -- led by an officer who is finding her own loyalties increasingly unclear -- and Claire's personal quest become entwined, and the young Canadian's involvement with the activist brings her ever closer to a shocking truth she might not be able to bear. The Water Man's Daughter, like its characters, is fierce and tender, thought-provoking and emotionally rich. It introduces Emma Ruby-Sachs as an enormously talented, original, and fearless new voice in Canadian fiction.

About the author

Contributor Notes

EMMA RUBY-SACHS's journalism has been published in The Nation and The Huffington Post. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of Toronto law school, Ruby-Sachs lived in South Africa for periods in 2003 and 2004 while studying. She has worked as a civil litigator in Windsor and Toronto and currently works with Avaaz, a progressive online organization. Emma lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt: The Water Man's Daughter (by (author) Emma Ruby-Sachs)

Nomsulwa plays with bullets in the alleyway, next to her cousin. He is talking to one of his tsotsi friends, boys who strut in packs around the township pretending to be members of gangs they are too young to join. They stand above her, leaning against the uniform brown of the house next door. Their shoes leave scuff marks in the dirt at their feet. The sun, which will eventually creep into every corner, bouncing off the bright corrugated metal walls and roofs, has not yet reached where the boys stand. Nomsulwa can barely keep track of all the gold and silver pieces under the shadows. “Why do you always have to bring her around?” one friend asks. Nomsulwa’s cousin shrugs, but doesn’t send her away.

“We can’t do anything with her here. Mira, get rid of her.”

“I can’t,” Mira answers. “My mom says I have to take care of her.”

Nomsulwa looks up. Mira’s mother never tells him to do anything. She is busy working and feeding half the neighbourhood, and Mira pretty much does what he wants. He never listens to Nomsulwa even though she’s older than him. She continues playing in the dirt.

The boy next to Mira pulls a gun out of his pants and turns it on Nomsulwa. He cocks the hammer as if to shoot and then relaxes his arm. Nomsulwa watches him as he does this, sees how the head of the gun contains circles surrounded by more circles, huddled around a dark tunnel. She puts out her hand.

“Can I see that?”

The boy looks to Mira.

“It’s okay, it’s not loaded.”

Mira nods and the boy hands the gun over. Nomsulwa feels its weight in her hands. They are small hands and the gun is a big gun. How does the boy point this at anything while keeping it steady? The metal on the handle is thicker than the head. It is silver and bumpy and some parts of the gun are cool even though it is very hot outside.

The boys begin arguing. There is a blast of dust as Mira pushes one of them against the wall and tugs him down into a headlock. Nomsulwa gets up and brings the gun out of the alley into the sunlight. She looks back and sees Mira bent now with his arm pulled behind his back. Across the street there is a dog curled into the curb. His hind legs fall at crooked angles. The bones announce themselves through the skin, a skeleton caked with brown fur. The muscles that may have once padded the dog’s behind are gone. Patches near the belly and where the front legs fade into the chest are bare of fur. There is only brown skin, scabbed and seeping.

Nomsulwa cocks the gun just like she saw the boy do. She presses a dark black button above the fat circle where the bullets are kept. The chamber releases and reveals five empty holes. She takes one of the bullets she had pocketed from the sandy ground, dusts it off on her pants, puts it in the very top hole, and clicks the chamber back into the middle of the gun. Nomsulwa knows the gun is loaded. She has seen this done before.

The dog lifts his head, eyes huge, mouth dripping. His tongue is pink, a healthy, beautiful pink. It hangs out of his mouth, just dabbling in the water collected in the crevices of the street. Nomsulwa checks on the boys behind her once more and then raises the gun and aims. The chamber clicks softly the first two times she pulls the trigger. The third time there is almost too much resistance against her fingers, and then a loud crack, like a thick balloon popping next to Nomsulwa’s ear, sounds out of the gun. Her arm is thrown backwards. The boys run to where she stands.

“Amazing!” the boy who brought the gun exclaims.

“That is so cool.”

Nomsulwa smiles and looks at Mira, seeking approval.

“What did you do?” he asks.

The dog’s body pushes backwards and it turns away from Nomsulwa, looking behind for the source of the noise. Its head sinks slowly, stopping bit by bit as it reaches sand. The tongue hits last, lapping at orange grain instead of brown water. The rib cage opens and closes, then is still. “I think I broke my arm.” Her hand still clutches the grip, but her forearm hangs at a strange angle.

Mira grabs the gun, throws it to the ground, and starts to drag her back into the shadows. A few mamas out on the street have stopped to look at the dog. They glare over at Mira, sucking their teeth. The older boy takes the gun from the sand and begins to run in the opposite direction. He runs fast, scared, but Nomsulwa doesn’t see anyone move to follow him.

An old woman buys three cabbage heads from the stand halfway down the block. A toddler pokes the dog with a stick and then shrieks back to his mother. The pain in Nomsulwa’s arm is just beginning to set in. Her mother is going to kill her for this.

The clinic is at the other end of the sprawling township. It is after midnight by the time Nomsulwa and her mother return home.

“Off to bed.” These are the first words Nomsulwa’s mother has said to her since Mira pulled her through the door and explained that she had fallen while chasing boys through the alley. It is a welcome overture after the tirade that greeted Mira, dragging the sobbing Nomsulwa to her front door. How could they be so irresponsible? Plus, don’t they know that Nomsulwa is too old to still play with boys?

She lays her head down on the pillow her mother has puffed up so it feels like a cloud when she touches it. She squirms and calls out, stopping her mother on her way out the door.

“Mama! Mama, ngicela ungixoxele inganekwana.”
I want you to tell me a story.

“Which story, my girl?”

Her mother puts mother hands on Nomsulwa’s forehead and kisses her twice, then she readjusts Nomsulwa’s arm, out of the covers, so the cast won’t go soft in the heat.

“Amanzi.”
Water.

It is Nomsulwa’s favourite. “Tell me how blue the Rain God’s skin is. Tell me how he breathes out the smell of morning dew wherever he goes.”

It was dry in Africa. The salty sea surrounded the land, mocking it with the folding blue- green of the waves. The people, inching outwards towards the rocky shore, spent days watching the water, praying that it would transform into sweet rain and share itself with the arid earth. They sang beautiful songs, and after the songs they built large fires and killed struggling goats, watching the red blood wet the ground for a moment before disappearing.

The Rain God had ignored the prayers of the people, but he could not ignore the smell of a young woman from deep within the village huts. He searched the ground until he spied a girl who was more beautiful than the rain. She had hair as black and shiny as a wet rock, eyes as gold as a soaked field, lips as brilliant red as a berry, and teeth so white you could reach into her mouth with your tongue and lap them up. The Rain God wanted the girl and so he transformed himself into an enormous bull and travelled to earth on a bolt of lightning. That night, a shock of light woke the girl from sleep.

She walked to the door of her hut and saw, across the field, a gigantic blue bull in a halo of white. As the animal approached, the mist of his breath filled the hut with the wonderful scent of fresh rain. The bull fell to his knees before the girl, his ears back and tail flat to the ground. The girl could see a man’s desire behind the bull’s eyes. She was frightened and pulled her wrap close around her, but she remembered that any hope of rain must be welcomed with love. So, she took a tuft of his purple hair in her hand and pulled herself onto the bull’s great back. The two left the hut, the smell of rain retreating with them, and trotted across the fields that bordered the village. He went with her to the distant mountains where the rain comes from.

As the water holes in the village filled with thanks from the Rain God, the girl’s people sang her praises. She had not angered the Rain God, but had given herself freely in the hope of water for all the villagers to share.

“Kwaphela ngenganekwane, lala manje.”
It’s finished, my baby. Sleep now.

“Sengilele.”
I am sleeping, Mama.

Editorial Reviews

"[An] assured debut . . . beautifully tense . . . at heart a morality tale."
Toronto Star

"Ruby-Sachs brings her setting and its cast vibrantly to life: the parching heat, night-time chills, the dirt tracks and clinging Soweto dust, the families living in near-poverty yet touchingly house-proud, while their civic officials boast charmless mansions and giant plasma TVs. . . . [The final] 40 pages . . . gather up the story's themes and plot strands in ways completely unexpected, and exhilarating."
Globe and Mail

"Ruby-Sachs has set herself an impressive agenda for a first novel . . . most notably her ripped-from-the headlines plot, authentic setting, and lively dialogue sprinkled with Zulu words and phrases."
Edmonton Journal

"[An] impressive debut. . . . Plays like a classic whodunit, but its mystery involves how much we really know about others -- especially those people we think we know best."
Quill & Quire

User Reviews

A story with no easy answers

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/2012/07/water-mans-daughter-by-emma-ruby-sachs.html

Set against the backdrop of post Apartheid South Africa, The Water Man's Daughter tells the story of a murdered Canadian water company employee whose death sparks a high profile investigation and a visit from his daughter, demanding answers. The genius of this novel is that there are no answers, at least not easy ones. Everyone is a hero and a villain in some way. The dead man was responsible for privatizing the water supply of the poorest regions of Johannesburg, cutting hundreds of families off from a clean water source. He was much despised and feared. He was also a loving father who is deeply mourned by his daughter. Although we do eventually understand the circumstances that led up to his death, this is by no means a traditional whodunnit. It's a complicated story told in simple prose (which I think makes it all the more powerful) that is as emotionally provocative as it is fascinating.

I'm glad I stuck with this novel. There was something about the beginning of it that I found difficult to grasp on to (it was probably just me, since the story itself is definitely interesting). Maybe it was the quietness of the prose. Perhaps I was expecting explosions, dialogue filled with gasping and shouting, long descriptions of dying animals in the street that are meant to act as not-so-subtle parallels to the violence of the setting, a young author's enthusiastic attempts to get the dialect of the black characters just right and then showing off her cleverness on every page. There was none of that. Instead Emma Ruby-Sachs let her story unfold quietly, evenly and simply, even when the story itself was graphic or tense. She never showed off how good she is at being a novelist, she simply wrote a good novel. The tone was like listening at the feet of a storyteller, which I think was just right.

I wouldn't be surprised if The Water Man's Daughter finds its way on to high school syllabi (is that the plural of syllabus? My spell check says no, but I think it is). It's not that I think it will be used to teach students about South African politics and infrastructure in the post Apartheid era. I don't know enough about South Africa to know if the details in the novel are accurate (but let's say, for the sake of argument, that they are). I think this novel could be used as a perfect example of the notion that "everyone is somebody's devil," that every story has multiple sides and no one side is ever completely right or completely wrong. I think it's a fact of human nature that we want to vilify our enemies and canonize our heroes (whether it's in the form of comparing anyone who annoys you on the internet to Hitler, or in the form of Disney's entire body of work). In reality, however, people rarely think of themselves as evil. Everyone has a point of view and everyone thinks they're doing the right thing, or else that their wrong thing is somehow justified. It makes the world complicated, but it's true. And if you wanted a literary example of a story in which everybody is right and everybody is wrong and the truth is muddled in between, this is it.

Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this book free from the publisher from NetGalley.com. I was not obliged to write a favourable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.