CAPE FEVER, by Nadia Davids
Midway through Nadia Davids’s new novel, “Cape Fever,” an Irishwoman cautions Soraya, a young Muslim maid, against placing too much faith in her British employer. “I know things about the English you couldn’t dream of.”
It’s true that the widow she works for, Mrs. Hattingh, is eccentric and particular. But whether or not the depravity Soraya uncovers has much to do with nationality, Mrs. Hattingh turns out to also be a formidable manipulator.
It’s 1920, and the women live in an unnamed city that closely resembles Cape Town under British control. Soraya was raised in the city’s Muslim quarter in a bustling home. Her father, a calligrapher, is renowned for his religious verses, which are hung in homes and shops to ward off evil.
Still, money is short, and Soraya has worked for years as a maid and cook by the time she joins Mrs. Hattingh’s household. Fittingly, her tenure there begins with deceit. “I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read,” she confides. By feigning illiteracy she allows her employer to bask in her self-image as a beneficent and progressive force who uplifts the disadvantaged around her.
In reality, Mrs. Hattingh would be a natural in a 20th-century adaptation of “Get Out.” She takes care to compliment aspects of Soraya’s race and faith — her work ethic and piety, her nimble hands — in an unfailingly patronizing register. When she’s not pining for her son, a recent veteran living in London, or instructing Soraya in the finer points of dust eradication, Mrs. Hattingh busies herself campaigning for the local university to admit women or learning about various cultures, including those that commingle in her adopted city. There is nothing she hates more than layabouts, she says, except small-mindedness.
“There was a time when the whole of the downstairs corridor was just lined with faces, mostly of your people, Soraya,” Mrs. Hattingh says of her former art collection, sold to stave off financial ruin. “Men, women and children in rich oils and pastels, some in rags, some in silks, most of them pensive or sad, and my late husband would say, ‘Do we have to have these miserable Blacks staring at us all day?’”
One such painting has remained — a striking portrait of a woman called Rosa. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Soraya, and becomes a surreal companion of sorts, along with the ghost of Soraya’s predecessor, during the interminable stretch before Soraya is permitted a brief visit home.
After Mrs. Hattingh learns that Soraya’s fiancé, Nour, plans to become a teacher, she praises him as one of “such dignified examples among your people, Soraya, working away to uplift your race.” Half-drunk one evening, she offers to write to Nour, who works on a farm outside the city, on Soraya’s behalf.
Like so many of her gestures and comments, it’s superficially well-intentioned but wholly inappropriate. Still, Soraya agrees, and once a week they sit together while her observations are translated into increasingly mawkish, purple correspondence. “She is fluently me from the first salutation,” Soraya thinks of Mrs. Hattingh’s confidence in assuming her voice. “It is that easy for her.”
It’s an efficient, and unsettling, staging — the white woman with a private agenda claiming the most intimate thoughts of her employee. Soraya intuitively understands the predation in the arrangement: “These people who hold sway over our outsides have no right to know, to touch, our insides.”
Of course, Soraya can read what Mrs. Hattingh writes on her behalf, and see the wild discrepancies therein. When the extent of Mrs. Hattingh’s self-serving machinations becomes clear, the women careen toward a psychological face-off that could be dissected in the D.S.M.
Davids assembles the requisite parts of a Gothic novel — a hysterical woman, a haunted dwelling, a perverse family secret — into an elegant narrative, one roomy enough to accommodate revenge.
She herself grew up in a Muslim family in Cape Town, and has made a point of exploring the lives of South African Muslim characters in her work. She has written that one of her grandmothers worked for a diplomat’s wife as a maid, and at several moments “Cape Fever” resembles an alternate life for her, one that might have afforded her a measure of self-determination. Knowing this history, one can forgive the moments in which Mrs. Hattingh is particularly clownish or diabolical, even by white colonial standards, or the occasional plot device that strains belief.
In a typically rude and clueless line of questioning, Mrs. Hattingh asks Soraya if any of her ancestors had ever been enslaved. Almost certainly, but to dwell in long-ago sadness is a privilege Soraya cannot afford. Davids can — and through this imaginary work she cautions us against the stains of the past.
CAPE FEVER | By Nadia Davids | Simon & Schuster | 228 pp. | $27
Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.
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