You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

  Semi-detached houses with red-polished stoeps line the west side of Trevelyan Road. On the east is the Cape Flats line where electric trains rattle reliably according to timetable. Trevelyan Road runs into the elbow of a severely curved Main Road which nevertheless has all the amenities one would expect: butcher, baker, hairdresser, chemist, library, liquor store. There is a fish and chips shop on that corner, on the funny bone of that elbow, and by the side, strictly speaking in Trevelyan Road, a dustbin leans against the trunk of a young palm tree. A newspaper parcel dropped into this dustbin would absorb the vinegary smell of discarded fish and chips wrappings in no time.

  The wrapped parcel settles in the bin. I do not know what has happened to God. He is fastidious. He fled at the moment that I smoothed the wet black hair before wrapping it up. I do not think he will come back. It is 6 a.m. Light pricks at the shroud of Table Mountain. The streets are deserted and, relieved, I remember that the next train will pass at precisely 6.22.

  HOME SWEET HOME

  A lady must never be seen without her handbag. So Aunt Cissie always says. Which must be why she has wedged the unwieldy object between her stomach and the edge of the dinner table. Visibly relieved, she pushes back her chair and releases the bag in order to rummage for the letter. Her eyes caper at the secrets awakened by her touch in that darkness, secrets like her electricity bill, so boldly printed in words and figures, protected from their eyes by the thin scuffed leather. They wait with the patience of those who expect to hear nothing new while her fingers linger over something deep down in the bag before she draws out the blue envelope. Then she reads aloud from Uncle Hermanus’s letter written in the careful English he never spoke:

  ‘I haven’t seen the ground for so many weeks now that I can’t believe it’s the same earth I’m walking on. Here is hard snow as far as the eyes can see. This really is the land for the white man.’

  ‘That’s Canada hey!’ and she pats the folded letter before slipping it back into the bag on her lap.

  Father licks his bone conscientiously and says, ‘Ja-nee’ with the sense of the equivocal born out of watching rainclouds gather over the arid earth and then disperse. ‘Ja-nee,’ he repeats, ‘that’s now a place hey!’ and with a whistling extraction of marrow from the neck of the goat, he laughs the satisfied laugh of one who has come to see the hidden blessings of drought.

  ‘And then they have to eat frozen meat as well,’ he adds, and they all roar with laughter.

  Uncle Gerrie shakes his head and points to Bakenskop in the distance. ‘No man, there, just there you can bury me.’ He turns abruptly to me. ‘Sies! What you want to go to these cold places for?’

  Father hangs his head. The silence squirms under the sound of clanking cutlery and the sucking of marrow bones. I herd the mound of rice on my plate, drawing into line the wayward grains so that Uncle Gerrie says, ‘Just so foolish like Uncle Hermanus. What you eating like that with just a fork? Take your knife man; you were brought up decent.’

  On this eve of my departure I will not invite discussion. I say nothing and think of Great Uncle Hermanus on the poop deck.

  The horn sounded, a rumbling deep in the belly of the ship, and we searched among the white faces for that of the old man. When he had finally found his way to the deck it was not hard to spot the dark crumpled figure whose right hand signalled its staccato wave like the mechanism of a wind-up toy gone wrong.

  Just before boarding he had said, ‘Man, there’s no problem; we’re mos all Juropeens when we get to Canada.’ His rough hand fluttered delicately to his mouth as if to screen a cough. And then he vomited. A watery stream with barely masticated meat and carrot splattered on Cousin Lettie’s new patent-leather shoes and excited relatives in bestwear stood back and the old man, bewildered in the ring created by his own regurgitation, staggered a grotesque dance around the puddle, looking confusedly at us in turn so that Aunt Cissie stepped into the ring and pressed him to the eastern slope of her enormous bosom, mindful of the mess still clinging to his mouth.

  ‘Ag Oompie, you’re so lucky to be going to a decent place. Mary and Andrew are there waiting for you; you haven’t seen Mary for three years now and shame, there’s a new grandchild hey! The Cloetes are in Canada also; all those old faces waiting to see you,’ consoled Cousin Lettie looking up from her once again shiny shoes. ‘And the journey won’t take long at all. I’m sure there’s some nice Coloured person on the boat. Look out for the Van Stadens from Wynberg; I think they’re also emigrating today.’

  Uncle Hermanus lowered the left corner of his mouth in grim pursuit of a smile. Then he kissed his goodbyes to all of us who had now moved in curved formation, shielding him from the pool of vomit. One of the children who audibly muttered ‘Sies’ was smacked and sobbed all the while we waited for the final wave, so that an uncle said, ‘Never mind, one day you can go and visit him in Canada.’

  He made it to the deck where he peered from under a hand shading his eyes at the gay tangled streamers, the coloured fragility of the ties that would snap as the boat wriggled away. In his pocket Great Uncle Hermanus found the two neat rolls of streamers, fumbled with the perfectly secured edges and, fishing for meaning in the threadbare convention, flung the little rolls triumphantly to the quay where one was caught by a sixteen-year-old white girl in beatnik dress. Behind the stirring ship Table Mountain, whose back I have woken up to for so many years in the Southern suburbs, stood squarely.

  ‘So we’ve sent you to college, your very own college that this government’s given you, just so you can go away and leave us to stew in ignorance. I know,’ Uncle Gerrie continued, ‘that here in the veld amongst the Griquas is no place for an educated person, but we all thought you liked Cape Town. The most beautiful city in the world you know, and the richest. There’s a future for you here.’

  I do not give a fig for the postcard beauty of the bay and the majesty of the mountain, the pretty white houses clinging to its slopes and the pines swaying to the Old Cape Doctor. A city of gleaming lavatories with the smell of disinfectant wafting from its pines. And the District Six I do not know and the bulldozers, impatient vultures, that hover about its stench. But I say nothing. At the base of this hollow edifice of guilt rattles the kernel of shame. I am grateful to Aunt Cissie who explains, ‘Ag, Gerrie, you know this child’s always been so. Everybody goes to Canada so she wants to go to England where there’s nobody, not a soul from South Africa. She’s stubborn as a mule; always pulls the other way.’

  But she laughs her clear laugh of running water and pats my back. I note the alarm in Father’s eyes and the lie comes effortlessly.

  ‘Mrs Beukes, my landlady, has a cousin who lives in London. I’ve arranged to live with her. And her family. They’re quite a large family.’

  They are pleased at the thought of a family, comforted at the Beukeses’ ability, in common with the rest of the animal kingdom, to reproduce themselves. But Uncle Gerrie is not prepared to let me off.

  ‘And why are you sailing at the devilish hour of midnight? Respectable people are fast asleep in their beds by then.’

  An image of Uncle Gerrie as a young man flickers before me but I grope in vain for something to pin my dislike on.

  ‘A good time to sail, New Year’s Eve,’ I say, attempting to sound gay. ‘I think there might be one or two decent people still dancing at that hour.’

  ‘Friedatjie,’ Aunt Cissie says, and I stiffen under the gravity of her tone. ‘You must be very careful, my child. Behave yourself at all times like a lady and remember honesty is always the best policy. Let me tell you, it’s at dances that temptation comes in all sorts of disguises.’ And dropping her voice in the interest of decency she adds, ‘Mrs Karelse tells me in her letter how the people behave on the ship where there’s no laws or police. Just poor whites, you know, so remember you’re an educated girl. There are skollies amongst the English as well. And if you’re good and careful, you’ll always be happy. D.V. And remember to pray every day.’

  An
xious to seal the topic of lust and temptation, Uncle Gerrie licks his fingers loudly and appeals to Aunt Cissie, ‘You must cut us the piece about Boeta Sol Geldenhuys’s daughter’s wedding in Beaufort.’ Aunt Cissie laughs her running-water laugh and launches into the story. They fill in the minor details while she develops a new theory on those events of three years ago. Father cannot resist pipping her at the post with the last line, ‘And the bridegroom jumped into the motor car and was never seen again.’

  They cut their stories from the gigantic watermelon that cannot be finished by the family in one sitting. They savour as if for the first time the pip-studded slices of the bright fruit and read the possibilities of konfyt in the tasteless flesh beneath the green. Their stories, whole as the watermelon that grows out of this arid earth, have come to replace the world.

  I would like to bring down my fist on that wholeness and watch the crack choose its wayward path across the melon, slowly exposing the icy pink of the slit. I would like to reveal myself now so that they will not await my return. But they will not like my stories, none of them, not even about the man in the train last night. When I should have said to the guard, ‘Sir,’ I should have said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but this is a women’s compartment.’ But of course he knew. Deference at that midnight hour might have worked. But how my voice would have quivered ineffectually, quivered with reluctance and come out sounding matter-of-fact anyway.

  I am wrenched out of sleep by the commotion outside my compartment door. A whining ‘Please my baas,’ and the Boer’s, ‘This way, you drunk bastard.’ And the terror tightens in my chest as the key fumbles in the door and the long silver tongue of the lock flicks over. The blue-eyed guard holds the sliding door with his uniformed thigh while he turns on the light and beckons to someone outside.

  ‘Come boy, and behave yourself; here’s a woman up there.’ But he does not as much as glance at me lying on the top bunk.

  A young man stumbles in with a record player and drops it loud enough to drown Blue Eyes’ key locking the door. I practise a number of sentences of protest and see myself charging after the guard in the corridor only to be met by the rebuff of ice-blue eyes staring through me uncomprehendingly. I do not choose to put up with the man in my compartment; fear of both men leaves me lying frozen in my bunk.

  I keep a concealed eye trained on him slumped on the opposite seat. He has brought with him the sour smell of sweat and too much wine. He pulls out the foldaway table and carefully sets up his record player and the disc to which he hums, She wears my ring . . .

  Under cover of the music the halted blood resumes its course through my veins. I manoeuvre my left elbow to support my body in readiness to defend myself against this man who will not leave me alone for long. I freeze again as he takes a bottle of brandy from his pocket and shouts, ‘Heppy, Heppyyyy,’ holding it out to the stiff rug-wrapped form that is me. A double swig to compensate for my failure to reply and he brings the bottle with such force on to the table that the needle shoots across to the last desperate notes of the song. He starts the record again, and having decided that I am a corpse sings along loudly the misheard words in fake American: To tell the world she die eternally. Over and over the record runs, reiterating its apology: That’s why I sing, Because she wears my ring.

  I cough and he looks up startled. He mimes the raising of a hat, greeting silently in order not to disturb the voice that etches its acid sentiment into my mind. As the song ends and he lifts the arm to start it yet again, I am driven to say, ‘How about the other side?’

  ‘No good, my goosie, a lot of rubbish that.’

  And down drops the needle to scratch its melancholic message once again so that I scramble from my bunk and rush out into the corridor and stare into the darkness of the country. I do not know where we are until I watch the day break into contours of light and shade across the frilled peaks of the Koeivleiberg, the plain bathed in the even yellow light and the sky a marble wash. The man inside turns the volume up. The chopped tune stutters its lyrics in the quieter moments of the train’s jicketty-can and I move further down the corridor. As we steam into Klawer I decide to take my seat again, but just as I reach the door it slides open and his body grows into the growing space as he stretches luxuriously. His trousers are slung low on his hips, not quite showing the crack of his buttocks, but the hat with the bouquet of feathers which he presses on to his head at a precarious angle is that of a countryman. When he gets off with the record player, which is his only luggage, he explains in the babyish diminutives of Afrikaans, ‘Gotta little businessy here before I return to Town. Lekker ridie my little bridie.’ And he winks, waving his single record merrily at me.

  No, they will not like this story. I rise from the table saying, ‘I must go down to the river. Where I spent so many happy hours of my childhood,’ I add histrionically, for I know that sentiment will stem the insistent cries that I should have another portion of Christmas pudding before setting out. And perhaps I ought to stand upon that ground, lower my head deep into the gorra and whisper my guilty secret: I will not come back. I will never live in this country again.

  In the six-monthly visits home over the past few years, I have not been down to the river. I have sat reading in the sun, anxious to return to the wet Cape Town winter. Or in the darkened room, fanning at the thick summer’s heat, steeped in the bright green meadows of Hardy’s England, a landscape anyone could love.

  The right bank on which I theoretically stand has almost disappeared, so that the land slides imperceptibly into the depression. Ahead, two thin lines of water meander along an otherwise dry bed. Beyond, a gaping donga replaces the track that previously staggered up the left bank. Which means that this road to the dorp no longer exists. How the back of the lorry bobbed up and down like a swallow’s tail in the shallow water as the men came home from work on Saturdays. Before the lorry it had been a tractor towing a trailerload of people, and before that, long ago, the dim memory of a wagon drawn by Oom Dawid’s mules.

  There must have been a flood and I wonder why Father did not write to tell me. Rainfall in the distant Bokkeveld mountains would have filled the river head with a swirling orange-brown water that raged its way for miles downstream. And here it surprised us on a morning as unremarkable as any other, without warning except for the muffled roar travelling a mile or more ahead, a sound by night that sleepers weave into their dreams. It would sweep along uprooted trees, monstrous swollen logs, a sheep or goat caught grazing in the river bed, and once there was the body of a woman. I had not seen her, the strange dead woman who passed so swiftly through the plains to be tossed under the eyes of fishermen into the sea at Papendorp. But at night in bed I saw her glassy eyes staring out of the blue-black face swollen with water. And the breasts like balloons bobbed on the water. She would have torn her clothes in the first struggle, and I buried my head in the pillow and squeezed my palms into my eardrums to fend off that death.

  On the first day the water roared along Salt River, filling the bed, beating against the high banks so that the women roaming the veld in search of firewood tossed the bundles from their heads and rushed down, doekies in disarray, to the call of the water. On the bank they stood huddled together in wonder and awe, and recounted previous floods and always the dead woman whose glass eyes still glinted from every wave. For three days the flood raged, and when the water subsided children and grown-ups alike paddled knee-deep in abandonment, the orange-brown liquid lapping at their legs. But I squatted on the sun-cracked bank and stared at the orange growing red-brown and viscous in the sun. Then I would see her black body bobbing in blood.

  But this flood must have been more forceful than anything I’d ever known as a child. For as far as I can see there is no real bank at all. Nothing more than a descent into the river. There is no point at which it could be said with certainty, this is where the river bed starts. For the bed and the right bank, quite unlike the left, lose themselves in each other. Even with a clearly defined bank the river presents di
fficulties. Not that anyone would argue about the three narrow ribbons of water or even the strips of wet sand between these. But on this side, where the sand seems dry, the possibility of a fourth ribbon of water cannot be altogether dismissed. Strips of blue-grey where dissolved salt glistens or patches of textured crust where salt crystals lie embedded in the sand suggest the possibility. I have known such strips to swell with water in a winter of rainfall and grow into yet more streams making up the river. Only where the sand lies in wind-wave patterns or rests in mounds at the bases of stunted dabikwa trees is there no doubt of the water remaining deep down in the earth. If there is any water at all. It seems more likely that a perpendicular sent down to the centre of the earth would erupt in a cloud of finest dust.

  The goats that had settled down for the afternoon’s rest stir as I approach the trees. I do not have a hat and sit down in the dappled shade where sparse leaves admit dancing flecks of sunlight. Birds flutter through the needle-leafed branches. A donkey brays from behind a further clump of trees, frogs croak and water, if only there were enough, would surely babble its protest from its separate brooks.

  I spit and watch the gob sizzle on the hot sand. It is not only an act of exasperation; my sinuses are troublesome today. And what do I expect? Did I not hope that my senses would quiver with receptivity, that all these sights and sounds would scratch about in the memory like hens in the straw until they found the perfect place to nest. Where in feather-warm familiarity I could be the child once more, young and genderless as I roamed these banks alone, belonging without question to this country, this world.

  In the ghanna bushes behind me there is a rustling sound I cannot identify. I remember the words, ‘Beware of snakes,’ the red letters of the warning label escaping from Father’s lips. It is true that he stumbled over the first syllable in the way that people do when they search for something to say. And muffled by the sound of my chair pushed back, I pretended not to hear. Just as I did this morning when he said, ‘It’s no good being so touchy. Just shut yourself off against things around you, against everything, and you’ll keep your self-respect. There’s something for you to try when you come back.’ When he raised his torso from the sawhorse the two suspended flaps of greased hair fell once again into their ordained places, adjacent, without a fraction of overlap, covering the shiny pate completely. If only there were no need to bend. Is it my fault that Father has grown so old?