The Light Remains (novel excerpt)

THE LIGHT REMAINS, to be published by Modjaji Press in 2026, received an honorable mention in the Fairfield Book Prize 2021. The judge, Shara McCallum said: “Keller's novel for me really is worthy of an honorable mention, if such a thing is possible. Keller's writing is graceful and replete with clarity and depth. She is clearly a gifted writer… I truly enjoyed reading her work and getting to know it.”

I read the below chapter live during the finalist night. Link to the reading can be seen here at around 11 minutes in.

Chp. 4 | WEAVER BIRD | Johannesburg, March 1960

Through the window of the Standard 9 dorm room I shared with my best friend, Elizabeth—“Call me Libby”—Peele, I watched a group of boys play a pick-up game of touch rugby. One side was shirts and the other skins. The negative space of their t-shirts still present in their tan lines, their pale backs and shoulders contrasting with darker arms and necks. They tumbled over one another like lion cubs with oversized paws and I rubbed my feet together under the desk, imagining the itch and scratch of the close-cropped grass on the players’ bare skin.

“If I was an animal, I'd be an antelope,” I said. Quick and light and as pale as the veld.

“You’d be a what?” Libby did not look up from her book.

Our dormitory was on the second floor of a Victorian mansion that had originally been built as the home of a wealthy mine magnate, but had lost some of its ambitious elegance in its conversion to a boarding school for young women. Painted an institutional beige, the room’s best feature was a large picture window, which occupied almost the entire top half of the end wall. It looked out on an oak tree and across the playing field of the all-boys high school to the concrete skyline that marked the southern edge of Johannesburg. Libby and I shared the desk that stood beneath the fixed centre pane, which was flanked by narrower windows that opened outwards with a hard twist and push on the iron handles. The morning light angled through to cast a yellow rectangle that flowed across the desk and pooled on the floor between our beds. It was in this light that I was failing to concentrate on the glossary in the Transvaal Education Department Std. 9 Biology textbook for an end of term test later that week. 

Absorption zone, adventitious roots, anatomy.

The textbook was full of dried veld grass, flattened leaves, and a selection of wild flowers that my father collected as he made his rounds on the farm. He mailed them to me once a month between the pages of his letters and I would press them between the pages of my text book. They smelled of sunshine and soil, and even in this one-dimensional, desiccated state, the plants still resembled their living selves. I could picture exactly where each had been picked or plucked; at the river, behind the barn, beside the track that ran past the dairy. 

I reached over to grip the handle of the window and jiggled until it turned the required forty-five degrees to release it from its frame. Shouts for the ball and a thud of contact carried in on the warm breath of the November morning. A church bell tolled in the distance. I breathed in and was transported by a note of damp earthiness within the metallic smell of the city, to early mornings on the farm. 

“We should be outside.”

Libby lay on her stomach on her bed with a book propped up on the pillow. This time, she stopped reading when I spoke and followed my gaze out of the window. “We should be at church,” she said, and returned to her book. 

My sister had come by this morning on her way to church, to ask if I wanted to walk with her. I’d told her I had studying to do, but now I wondered if sitting for an hour on a hard pew would have been a better choice. “Come on, Libs. I need some fresh air.”

“I have to finish this book. It's my mom's only copy and she wants it back before her book club.” Marking her place with a finger, Libby folded back the brown paper cover to reveal the title: A World of Strangers, by Nadine Gordimer. The banned novel was like contraband, a single copy passed from one reader to another.

"Is it terribly racy?" My mother kept a similarly wrapped volume of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in the back of her drawer in the sun room.

"It's not sexy, it’s subversive." Libby rolled her eyes to dismiss the claim. “My mother is making me read it.”

I knew the real reason Libby didn’t want to go outdoors was because she didn’t want to miss a call from Jonty, inviting her to the Freshers Ball at WITS University where he was a first year. The buzz throughout the boarding house was all about the dance; who was lucky enough to be invited, who was going with whom, who was wearing what, hairstyles, makeup, handbags.

I sagged back into my chair, swiveled around and put my bare feet up on Libby’s bed. The eiderdown was more expensive than anything I owned. A richly woven cotton, embroidered with white roses that stood proud of the fabric and rubbed with a pleasing pressure against my soles. Libby’s toe nails were painted with pink-pearl while mine were bare and uninteresting. She was only six months older than me, yet seemed so much more grown up. Born in Johannesburg, Libby had lived in the city all her life, had been to the theatre, (more than once) had travelled overseas, knew how to ski, and was going steady with Jonty. I’d been thrilled when we were paired up on our first day at boarding school. The idea that this sophisticated girl, who styled herself on Jackie Kennedy, wanted to be my friend was still hard for me to get used to. 

We frequently spent weekends together at Libby’s home in Houghton where I was given my own bedroom, just one of many unoccupied guest bedrooms Mrs. Peele had available for visitors. Unlike the farmhouse, where Lily and I had shared a room all our lives and where, on the few occasions we did have overnight guests, the two of us slept top-to-tail on the sofa in the lounge. Libby’s mom was liberal in her politics and had a whispered association with the Black Sash. She’d once told us off for being dismissive about voting when we turned eighteen. “There are people in South Africa who have lived and died for the right to vote, girls.” 

Mr. Peele, on the other hand, was an intimidating and distracted businessman who only half listened to the conversation between his wife, his daughter, and her little friend, and seemed to tolerate his wife’s politics as if they were a feminine hobby she’d taken up, like book club or sewing, and that could be just as easily set down if it became inconvenient, or interfered with their social or travel plans. 

The first time I’d sat down to dinner with the family, served by a houseboy and a maid, Mr. Peele had responded to my explanation of where our farm was by observing with a smile: “…the other side of the tracks.” Mrs. Peele had leaned over and aimed an ineffectual slap at her husband’s shoulder, “Shush, George.” I knew that we literally lived across the main railway track that ran through Johannesburg, (and probably a few other railway lines, too) but I saw my friend’s gracious embarrassment and understood the true meaning of the phrase, and it stung. The Peeles were rich. Rich in a way I could not really comprehend. Mr. Peele’s family owned copper mines in Northern Rhodesia. They had a holiday home on the South Coast and a game farm near the Bechuanaland border. Although I’d never thought of my family as poor, there were things we simply did not have, things I’d accepted we’d never have. Things I’d never realized I wanted. I reacted defensively, exaggerating my family's role as milk producers. The size of the herd and the acreage they managed were given dimensions that I then had to maintain, and after that dinner, whenever I met Libby’s friends and was asked about my family and where I came from, to my shame, I referred to our home as The Farm. “My parents are on The Farm this weekend.” As if it were a second home we used for leisure, visiting only on the weekends or during holidays.

I tugged at the hem of my cotton blouse. It hung almost straight over the very slight rise of my chest. As “a late bloomer,”—my mother's words—I knew that with my sandy-blonde bobbed hair, pale eyelashes and boyish hips, I was in no danger of being asked to this, or any other dance, anytime soon.

“Why don’t we walk down to the church and see if Jonty is there?” I suggested, knowingly trying to manipulate my friend. I wanted to feel the lawn beneath my feet, the pebbled path, the cool water in the fountain at the centre of the quad.

“He’s not. He’s camping in the Magaliesberg with his family this weekend.” Libby rolled onto her back and carried on with her book.

Bracing my legs against her bed, I rocked back on my chair and closed my eyes. The sun dissolved into molten light behind my eyelids as I relaxed my muscles, lengthened my legs, softened my shoulders, and focused on balancing on the chair’s back legs.

A movement, like a shadow passing quickly across a lit doorway, followed by a flapping and a short scream from Libby, knocked me out of my reverie. All four chair legs and my own two feet dropped to the floor. A flash of bright yellow in the corner of the room revealed a male weaver, flapping hard in the gap between the ceiling and the top of the regulation wardrobe.

“It came through the window,” Libby said from behind her book. 

The bird landed briefly on the slight curve of wood that passed for decoration on the top of the wardrobe, then flew up again, working its small wings against the ceiling in quick, surprisingly loud taps, like a flag in a strong wind.

“Keep still, I’ll try to herd it out,” I said. 

Before I could get to it, the bird, drawn by the illusion of freedom beyond the unseen barrier, launched itself from the top of the wardrobe and flew directly at the centre pane. It struck the glass hard and dropped onto the open biology textbook I’d been revising moments before. The small feathered body curled into itself with its black and golden wings folded behind its body, and the pale orange legs and feet, tucked into its belly. The weaver’s eye was open, as round and as red as a Lucky Bean, its black centre was dull and unfocused. 

Libby’s brown eyes peered over the top of her book. “Is it all right?”

“Just stunned, I hope.” 

There was a knock on the door and a voice called, “Hunter? Are you in?” 

Without taking my eyes off the bird, I replied that I was.

“Telephone call,” the voice said.

Libby and I glanced at each other, then back to the bird. A foot twitched. Libby hid her face again and shrunk back against the wall. I called that I was coming, then rushed to grab a shoebox from the top shelf of the wardrobe, discarded the lid and turned the patent leather heels I saved for special occasions out onto my bed. I grabbed a pen and stabbed a few rough holes into the base, then up-ended the box and placed it carefully over the bird. “Leave it under there until I get back. It’ll feel safer in the dark.” 

The messenger, a girl from my field hockey team, was waiting at the top of the stairs. At my appearance, she called back in a sing-song voice: “It’s a boy!” This news was met with a chorus of oohs and ahhs from within the row of rooms that flanked the corridor. 

Thomas. 

My face flushed pink. First with the unwanted attention, then because I was blushing at all, and finally with irritation that I hoped it might be him. Thomas would never think of me as anything but the slightly scruffy girl from next door. It was stupid to even imagine anything different.

The telephone hung inside a wooden booth in an alcove beneath the grand staircase. I looked for Lily in a group of her friends who had gathered in the common room. They were dressed in their Sunday best, either waiting to be picked up for lunch or having recently returned from church. Each girl was wearing a dress in a different pastel color and clustered together as they were, they reminded me of a bowl of ice cream; a scoop of strawberry, a scoop of mint, a scoop of lemon. The only man I ever spoke to on the phone was my father, who called every Sunday. He’d ask a couple of questions about classes, field hockey, and then sign off with an awkward business-like phrase: “Keep well,” or “Let’s keep in touch,” as if we ever wouldn’t.

“Hello?”

“Johnny?” It was Thomas. At the sound of his voice, a rush of heat travelled through me. It sparked down my arms and fizzed in my fingertips. I became aware of the weight of the receiver in my hand. I pressed a flat palm over my sternum, certain that the thud-thud-thud of my heart would be picked up by the receiver, conveyed through the wires via the central telephone exchange, and into the entrance hall at the Turner’s farmhouse where the phone sat on a small mahogany bench and where Thomas would be standing. To punish my old friend for having this effect on me, I did not reply.

“Hello?” he repeated.

I kept my voice even, “Who is this?” 

“It’s me, Thomas.” 

“Yes,” I lengthened and softened the vowel to affect a more urban sophistication. I rolled my eyes at myself.

“Is Lily with you?” 

Irritated that he was looking for my sister, I decided not to tell him she was at church. “Why?”

“You need to find her.”

The antelope inside me lifted its head with an instinct for danger and froze. When I spoke, it was in my own voice, “Why? What’s the matter”

“Hold on a minute,” Thomas’s voice muted as he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and spoke to someone else in the room. “Tannie, Eve’s on.” He spoke in fits and starts, as if he was listening and talking at the same time. 

“Thomas?"

He didn’t reply.

“Is something wrong?”

“Hang on, Eve. I’m waiting for your ma…,” he paused and in the background I heard a woman’s voice. He continued, “it's about your dad. I’m sorry.” 

Thomas’s voice was followed by the sound of the telephone being passed, as if someone was threading the instrument through one end of a woolen sleeve and pulling it out the other side. The slam of a door, distant voices, a woman's high keening cry. Heels advanced across the floor. I felt a wave of something elemental rush towards me; an impulse to run. I held the handset away from my ear and covered the black bloom of the earpiece with my hand. The wave pooled inside my bare feet and crept up my ankles, filled my thighs, circled my hips and leached into my stomach. When I lifted the phone back to my ear, my mother’s voice was explaining about a fault with the electric drill up at the barn. That they tried to revive him, but it was too late, that the shock was too severe and sustained. A short in the wiring. I pictured the stunned bird’s clawed foot. My father’s clawed hand. Electricity buzzing blue beneath his skin. 

The girl in lemon was leaving. She grew small as she walked towards the front door where a young man in a dark suit waited. Her kitten heels clipped across the wooden floor, were quiet on the carpet, and clipped again on the other side. As she reached the man, he opened the door and a sudden burst of light burned them both into silhouettes, smoking their edges. They went through together and the door swung closed, leaving the lobby darker than it had been before.

“Eve?” My mother’s voice was thick and unfamiliar. 

I felt a disconnection from my own name. Eve. A numbness like when I fell asleep on my arm settled through my body, which felt heavy and unresponsive. I sat down hard on the small bench built into the side of the phone booth.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Over the phone.”

My mother inhaled and exhaled inside the ear piece. “Evie, you must find Lily. Thomas is leaving now to pick you up.”

“Is he all right?" Something in my voice must have drawn the attention of the strawberry and mint girls at reception. They turned in my direction. I spun my back to them. “Where is he?” I said.

“He just left. He’ll be in Johannesburg in about an hour.”

“Not Thomas. Where’s Dad?”

There was silence, broken by my mother drawing a breath. When she spoke again it was through tears. “Evie, you need to pack a bag.” 

The strawberry girl pushed the phone booth’s concertina door open. Sounds from the boarding house—calling voices, music, quick footsteps across the floor—came to me as if through a shell held to my ear, with the hiss of wind across sea. The girl looked concerned and offered me her hand. Uncertain about what she intended, I placed the telephone handset into her open palm and, shoulder first, nudged past her out of the wooden booth.

“My dad died.”

I had never considered what life might look like after my father’s death. I knew, of course, in the same way I knew that birds flew, that he would die one day, as everybody did. It was my mother’s death I’d often imagined, accompanied by the uncomfortable thrill of excitement at the temporary celebrity that my mother’s loss would bring. For as long as I could remember, there had been periods when my mother was absent, drifting in and out of our lives like a season. The times she was present—when she laughed and joined in with games or met us in the morning, already dressed, hair neat, preparing breakfast—was like essential sunshine, and I harvested what I could, quickly and regularly. Constantly alert to the possibility that the axis might tilt and she would fade away again. But my father was different. Solid, present, and reliable. My future lay before me as a straight road highlighted by important events that lit up like street lamps and my father appeared in all of those events. Standing on the steps of the school at my matriculation, helping me move into my first flat, teaching my children how to swim in the river, how to drive, holding their small bodies securely on his lap behind the wide, thin steering wheel of the old blue truck. In all these projections, my father existed forever on the farm, where my future family would visit every Sunday for lunch.

I waded across the lobby. At the staircase, I gripped the bannister with both hands and lifted each foot, higher than was necessary, as if I were stepping over an invisible barrier. 

Wood was hard. Stairs went up. Light cast shadows. 

My pale feet stepped heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe along the wooden floor. I opened the door to the dorm room. From Libby’s reaction, her wide eyes and o-shaped mouth, and the sudden way she was on her feet, I understood that my new reality was etched on my face. 

“My dad died.” 

Died, not is dead, as if it was an impermanent state. A passing event that could still be rectified. I paused for a moment in the truth of this statement: My dad died, and felt into myself for the appropriate emotion. There was shock. There was disbelief. But mostly, there was a hollowness, not unlike hunger. An empty, yet steadying practicality, asking: what now? “Stiff upper lip, Johnny.” The words arrived in my father’s voice. I crossed the room and dropped into the chair in front of the desk, where I had begun a very different Sunday morning only a short while ago. Through my dampened senses, the rugby players thudded against one another on the field outside, a car engine fired into life, was revved then faded, the opening notes of Perry Como's Some Enchanted Evening floated in from the corridor. As I stared, the light coming through the picture window split into tiny molecules of color that distorted the room.

“How’s your mother?” Libby said, and I was embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t thought to ask. I shook my head.

“What happened?” Libby said.

“An electric shock.”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Eve.” 

Libby knelt before me and took both my hands in her own, her eyes filling with tears. I could tell that she was holding herself back from asking too many questions and I was grateful for the consideration. Not because I didn’t have any answers, but because I didn’t want to dwell on the questions of how someone dies of an electric shock. Does it hurt? Is it quick? I recalled a black and white photograph I’d once seen in a magazine of a wooden chair attached to the ground by metal hinges, leather straps hanging from the arm rests and from the front legs, a domed metal cap positioned above it. I didn’t want to imagine my father’s clenched teeth, his frantic limbs, his hands clawed and reaching. The wave swept through my chest and choked me. Stiff upper lip. Don’t let the side down. Family business is family business. I withdrew my hands.

“Thomas is on his way. I need to find Lily and pack a bag.”

“Let me do it,” Libby said and immediately busied herself with the task. She told a girl in the corridor to find Lilian Hunter, then pulled an overnight bag, smarter than anything I owned, off the top of her own wardrobe and filled it with items from my shelves. Underwear, stockings, a nightdress, two school blouses and a pinafore, a navy skirt. Like a sick child whose mother does all the caring, I allowed her to make all the decisions, even about what toiletries I might need (a toothbrush, toothpaste, a tub of face cream,) as well as to respond to the concerned line of faces that appeared one after another at our door, until Libby closed it. 

“Bad news travels fast,” she said, sifting through my school uniforms and the few dresses hanging in my wardrobe. I only had a couple and they were both in the lighter shades of blue that I favored. 

“Nothing black, or even navy here, Evie.”

“Lily will have something.” My sister was taller than me, and more shapely, but she was sure to have I could wear.

The upturned shoebox on the desk shifted with a light nudge from within. Securing the box with one hand, I slipped my other hand under the textbook and carried both to the windowsill in front of the open window. Slowly, carefully, I lifted the side of the box that faced the window while keeping the side closest to me closed against the book, like my father had taught me to lift rocks in the veld in case a snake rested underneath. There was a quiet hop. Then a scratch like a sharp pencil moving across paper. The bird came into the light, blinked its hot red eye, then pushed and flapped in one movement and it was free.

A print had been left on the glass by the weaver bird’s impact. Ghostly flight feathers tipped splayed wings, individual tufts of down on the soft crop, the small head and even the tiny nostril were etched on the glass in oil, like a memory.

From the back seat of the Turner’s car, I kept my eyes on the smooth skin of Thomas’s neck as he explained how a faulty wire had caused a short that killed our father as he hung the door on the new barn. 

Lily, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, began to cry, and he took his hand off the steering wheel and reached across the bench seat to comfort her. 

“It’ll be alright, Lil. Things like this don’t happen to us,” I said. 

I very badly wanted to believe my words, but my voice faltered. I was younger but I had always been braver. I was the one who would determine which part of a stream was narrow enough to be cleared in a single jump, which branches could be trusted to climb a tree, which berries were safe to pick and eat. As Thomas pulled Lily into his shoulder, my certainty unfurled like the soft whorl of a new fern. Thomas’s eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror. His were vivid with pain and something deeper that I suddenly understood. The time for false confidence had passed. The safe world my sister and I occupied, and had never thought to question, had been shocked open. Reality had elbowed its way in with the painful realization that things like this did, indeed, happen to us.

Out of the rear window the city folded away like the pages of a magazine and the road ahead opened to wide horizons of field after field of grazing cattle and yellow veld and the familiar landscape of home. I became aware of the biology text book in my lap and tried to remember when I’d picked it up or why I’d brought it with me. To study for a test that had seemed so important only a few hours ago? I allowed the heavy book to drop open and found a dried oak leaf, which I spun by the stem, investigating the pale delta of veins that spread across its surface. Using my thumbnail I picked off a clutch of moth eggs that had hatched there, blackened, and dried. They dropped to the pages of the textbook. As I swept the eggs away with the side of my hand, the truth of the day flooded in, along with my father soaked in summer rainfall, describing how the crepuscular rays that fall like blessings are made visible when dust or moisture move through light, but that light remains, even when it cannot be seen.