The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Page A

resemblance of family members in your features: my cousin Andrew, my younger brother, and even me. The photograph next to this is also of you, but it is sixty years later and you are a different man. It is printed in a pamphlet-sized parish magazine, The Link , dated September 1952. You are sitting on an old trunk in front of two thatched rondav-els, their mud and daga walls painted with patterns. Again you are looking out of frame, but this time in profile, and from behind a pair of dark round sunglasses. You wear an old panama perched on the back of your head, an oversized light jacket, books bulging from its pockets, and battered shoes. One hand holds the side of the trunk you sit on, the other a clay pipe, your elbow resting on your thin crossed legs. Your face is sunken, the cheeks indented, as if sucked in by a vacuum inside you, and your mouth is down-turned. I do not think you know a photograph is being taken. The caption beneath it reads simply, Arthur Shearly Cripps—Poet . I place the two photos next to each other, and again I feel uneasy. There is something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table, the beginning and end of an untold story which has, over those sixty years, written itself on your face and your body. I put them down and pick up another studio portrait, taken in 1912 and given to the Schultz family, in which you are dressed in your safari solar hat, safari jacket and white dog collar. You look straight into the camera, your chin locked at a defiant angle and your eyes burning into its lens. I look back at them, and they seem to be accusing me, challenging me. Asking me what I am doing there in your life so long after you died.
    I turn away to the other photographs, to the other stages of your life played out in the work of light on paper. You in your long black priest’s cassock under the African sun. Your church, its five high-domed thatched roofs like a patch of giant termite mounds rising from the flat earth, a crude wooden cross topping their disorder. You aged seventy-two, your eyes obscured by the round medical sunglasses, standing beside E. Ranga, an African evangelist who stares solemnly into the camera, taut in his European suit, shirt and tie. A black-and-white postcard of a ship, the Hertzog , white spray about its prow and two lines of signatures signed above and below it, one in the sea, one in the sky.
    One photograph in particular catches my eye. It is a wedding photo, taken outside the entrance to your church at Maronda Mashanu. You stand in the background, wearing a black hat folded at the sides and your long white, pleated vestments. Yours is the only white face, and the rest of the wedding party stand in front of you, just the bride sitting down, the groom, bridesmaid and best man flanking her. They wear suits and dresses that appear a brilliant white. The old camera cannot cope with the midday heat reflected, and all of you shine out against the grey of the church and the veld, an angelic haze surrounding you as if your bodies are on the point of diffusion, burning brightly in the brief dilation of the lens. In the corner of the photograph, hard to see on first looking, a ribbed dog slouches past, its shrunken belly pulled taut against its spine, its thirsty tongue hanging loose from its jaw.
    There are other photographs not of you, and I find myself scanning the ones of the women, in their high lace collars and neat buttoned dresses, the line from Steere’s book—‘ a persistent rumour of a love affair ’—still repeating in my head. I do not really know what I am looking for, a face to attach to this suggestion perhaps. But I find none. There is a photograph of your mother, Charlotte, your sisters Edith and Emily, but no woman whose name has any reason to arouse my suspicion. And it is the same with the letters. You wrote to everyone: family, friends, societies, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Manchester