You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

  My hand goes to the crown of my own head. If my hair should drop out in fistfuls, tired of being tugged and stretched and taped, I would not be surprised. Do my fingers run through the synthetic silk with less resistance than usual? What will I do in the damp English weather? I who have risked the bulge of a bathing suit and paddled in the tepid Indian Ocean, aching to melt in the water while my hair begged to keep dry. What will I do when it matts and shrinks in the English fog? Perhaps so far away where the world is reversed an unexpected shower will reveal a brand-new head of hair sprung into its own topiarian shape of one-eared dog.

  A whip cracks through the silence. If I keep very still I might not be seen, but the foliage is too sparse. It is Oom Dawid in his ankle-hugging veldskoen and faded khaki shirt, flourishing his whip. My tongue struggles like a stranded fish in the dry cavity of my mouth. Why do I find it so hard to speak to those who claim me as their own? There is nowhere to hide so with studied casualness I walk towards him, but the old man, preoccupied, seems to stumble upon me, squinting before he greets. The stentorian voice has shrunk to a tired rumble and the eyes are milky in their intimate search of my face. The great rough hand shakes mine with faltering vigour and under his smile my mouth grows moist and my tongue pliant once more.

  ‘Ja,’ Oom Dawid says, ‘about time you came home to see us. But I hear you’re going over the waters to another world. Now don’t stay away too long.’

  ‘Yes, it’s nice to be back. I’m going to England on New Year’s Day,’ I blurt.

  ‘Still,’ the old man persists, ‘you’re home now with your own people: it can’t be very nice roaming across the cold water where you don’t belong.’

  I burrow the point of my shoe in the sand and giggle foolishly.

  ‘Ja, Ja-nee . . .’ Oom Dawid rumbles. ‘So-o, so it goes,’ which he repeats after a short silence with the ease of someone offering a fresh diversion in the face of flagging conversation. Then his face breaks out in a network of smiles as he remembers a request he has been nursing.

  ‘About the Queen,’ he announces, ‘you must go and see if she’s still young and beautiful.’

  I remember the faded magazine picture of the Coronation stuck above his sideboard.

  ‘Oh, I won’t be seeing the Queen of England. I don’t care two hoots about her.’ I instantly regret the sharp words. But the old man laughs, unperturbed.

  ‘Then I’ll have to go and see for myself one day and tell the Queen about these Boers and how they treat us.’

  He looks at me sharply. ‘You have to put your heart with someone. Now you don’t want to know about Vorster and you don’t care about the Queen and our Griqua chief isn’t grand enough for you. It’s leaders we need. You young people with the learning must come and lead us.’

  The old guilt rises and wrings the moisture from my tongue. Even though I know him to be committed to the slogan of Grown-ups Know Best, that he wouldn’t dream of paying heed to anything I have to say.

  ‘Ja . . . aa . . . so-o,’ Oom Dawid reiterates and the old Namaqua eyes narrow amiably. ‘Anyway, you’re back with us now, here where you can always see the white stones of our mother’s grave on the koppie. And he points to the hills in the distance. ‘And your father grows grey. A man mustn’t grow old without his children around him. Old Shenton must write a letter for me to Lizzie’s madam in Cape Town. She’s got a grand job in Town, a kind of housekeeper for English people, but she must come home now. We’re getting too old. Antie Saartjie can’t do much now – the legs you know. Ag, you young people are so grand in your motor cars,’ he says inexplicably, and turns, deftly pinching his nostrils in turn to propel from each a neat arc of snot.

  ‘I must go and find these damn mules. Do you remember Bleskop? Very old now, but still goes wandering off to plague me. Yes, I’m after them every day. Like you they’ve always got somewhere to go. More trouble than they’re worth.’

  He shakes my hand and walks off, saying, ‘When you get back, come and tell me about the wonderful things across the water. I must tell you about the old days, of how the people trekked from Griqualand’, and he stops for a moment, genuinely perplexed, to add, ‘I don’t know if the Queen knows about all that.’

  I watch him stride across the water to the left bank where the new path winds tortuously around the donga. The crack of his whip echoes across the river bed. If I did not fear his scorn, I would have asked him where the gorra was. But he would have seen it as city affectation. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he would snort, ‘you’ve carried water all your life like the rest of us.’

  Why did Father not ask me to take a bucket, I wonder, as I walk towards the gorra. I stop to tip the sand out of my shoes but the earth sizzles with heat and I can barely keep my balance hopping on each shod foot in turn. I must find it and get out of this heat.

  The wide bank with a sprinkling of Jan Twakkie trees is surely the place. But the bank is a uniformly smooth stretch of sand with no trace of the well. I orientate myself by lining up the great dabikwa tree with the cavern on the left bank. Sitting down, I survey the shape of the gully, unfamiliar at this angle. And move to the left, and move again until the blinding light strikes the fissure where the crabs dig snug holes in the dove-blue clay.

  With a twig I draw a circle which is unmistakably where the gorra had been, where it now lies buried under a layer of sand and mud from distant mountains. Or else they have removed it and the wet sand, according to kinetic law, has fallen in piece by piece as it shook off the years of restraint moulded by the cement walls. For the well had been just a six-foot cylinder of cement sunk into the sand and then evacuated. Here Oom Klonkies from Rooiberg trailed his forked stick, frowning, and pronounced that the water would be less salty. And he was right. The water was brack but thirst-quenching, unlike the bitter-salt running water of the river that parches the throat.

  The mouth of the cylinder curved outward for nine inches above the sand level. Here as a child I lay on my stomach to watch my framed face in the water below. And bent down with the cement wedged under my left armpit, I would scoop up the still water with a tin mug and in that vast silence listen to the rhythms of water lilted into tin, hauled up against the cement wall, and warble into the metal bucket. Before the buckets were filled the water supply would run out. And as the level fell the framed portrait faded, grew darker so that I would clasp with both arms the fat cement mouth, straining to see through my mocking image the new growth of water. Unless you whispered, coaxed, the water refused to rise. With my head hanging deep down in the darkness and the blood rushing hither and thither in my veins, I sang my song of supplication until the water spirits gurgled with pleasure and the face framed in the circle of water grew whole once more.

  If the well were here still, if I could feel the pitted cement pressing into my naked armpits and stare at my severed head in the water, it would come – the song of supplication that will rouse the appropriate feelings in me.

  My head nods to the tune but the words loiter on the tip of my tongue, scratch as they try to scale my slippery throat, and then a bird screams so that they scurry back down. Instead another chant from childhood takes over:

  Bucket in the hand

  Bucket on the head

  Feet in the sand

  Wish I were dead. (There was nothing else to rhyme with head.)

  Over and over along the track as I balanced my way home with the buckets, stopping only once to change hands.

  The traffic of words is maddening. I am persecuted by a body of words that performs regardless of my wishes, making its own choices. Words will saunter in and vanish in a flash, refusing to be summoned or expelled. Just as I cannot summon my heart to beat faster or slower, so the words in conversation could tumble out regardless or refuse to be uttered, betraying or making a fool of me. Thus the water song will not surface while the bucket chant will not be banished.

  I follow the track which was once the well-worn path to our house. Half-way along I stop to look back. I can see the old m
an across climbing the hill. The tops of trees pop up above the straight line cut by the river. Across the river, the hills swell abruptly into a ridge that meets the sky in a straight line horizontal to the fissure of the river. The glaring white pebble crust of the hill lifts pointillistically in the sun, its squat succulents grey stipples in the distance. The railway line at the foot of the ridge parallel to the river has only just been built. I have not yet seen the ISCOR train running along it, its hundred or more trucks a black line of iron and steel drawn across the ridge. Or so Father said in his last letter. That there were a hundred and nine trucks that day, the longest ever to travel between Sishen and Saldanha Bay. Which means that he runs out to the train every other day to count the trucks, for how else would he know and why would he write immediately, a scribbled salutation and then the breathless news of a hundred and nine trucks, before the guarded demand that I spend the last days at home where everybody, all the family, is coming to see me?

  Empty-handed I carry on walking towards the house. They are sitting on the stoep waiting for the breeze that will cool the day. The wind is just rising. On the dead plain, circles of dust are spun and lifted, up, up, spiralling into fine cones that dance teasingly in my path. Grains of sand whirl past and sting my cheeks. The hot breath of this wind brings no relief.

  The party on the stoep is watching, no doubt discussing me, my marriage prospects, my waywardness and my unmistakable Shenton determination. There is no point in lingering. There is no concealed approach to the house. A head-on collision with all that consanguinity cannot be avoided. The bosoms of the aunts are mountainous; the men are large like trees. Aunt Nettie has timed the coffee to be ready at my arrival.

  ‘You’ve been a long time,’ someone says.

  I smile, unable to summon a reply.

  ‘Ag, no,’ Father says, ‘let the girl be. She hasn’t seen the old place for such a long time.’

  ‘There’s no place like home,’ says Aunt Cissie.

  ‘And home is where the heart is,’ Father adds, and then he frowns for that is not quite what he means.

  I watch him pour the coffee into his saucer. With lips pouted for the purpose, the liquid is syphoned from saucer to throat. Coffee trickles from his old man’s mouth. With the lower lip both protruding and sagging, the liquid has no choice but to drip on to his new crimplene trousers. He rubs the stain with the back of his hand.

  ‘Ag ja,’ Aunt Nettie sighs, ‘a woman’s work is never done.’ She casts a significant but fruitless look at her older sister before rising with the tray, her rear following reluctantly.

  A conversation buzzes about my ears while the silly bucket rhyme mills through my mind.

  ‘What do you say, Frieda?’

  There is no need to admit that I have not been listening. I do not have to say anything. The question is purely phatic. They have come to see me, to rest their eyes on me, reassured by the correctness of the family gathered here.

  ‘A person of few words, our Frieda,’ says Uncle Gerrie, ‘a sure sign of wisdom.’ I remember now, in his pre-gold-teeth days, Uncle Gerrie as a young man in a straw hat, trowel in his hand. ‘Baboon,’ he shouted at me. ‘Why is this ugly child always in the way?’ And he slap-slapped the cement, levelling off this very stoep. Not that this can really be called a stoep. Merely a two-foot-high block of cement on to which the kitchen door opens, keeping the dust at bay. There is no verandah, and without that protective structure the eyes cannot consume the land in the same way that the colonial stoep allows.

  ‘So you’ve been down to the river?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, eh . . .’ and the dots of hesitation hang like a row of fireflies in the dark until I find my voice to continue. ‘It must have been quite a flood. I barely recognised the place. I had some trouble trying to find the gorra but then I remembered the big tree and the gully.’

  Father says, ‘The gorra’s been gone for nearly a year now. We even get our washing water from the dorp. Nice to get a good lather with soapsuds. I’m surprised you found the gorra; that whole bank’s completely washed away. Did you go beyond Blouklip? From there you can just about recognise the old gully.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you lined up the tree with the wrong gully, I think. Yours is the recent one made by last year’s flood.’

  Perhaps I ought to go to Blouklip now, but in this whirling dust I fear for my sinuses. It will be better indoors. I join Aunt Nettie in the kitchen where she dries the dishes but she clutches the dish towel to her chest when I offer to help.

  ‘No, you have a rest today,’ she says. ‘But don’t forget, my child, wherever you lodge – with a nice family of course – to always help with the work. Don’t just sit in your room with your books. A girl should help to keep the house tidy. And when you meet a nice man you’ll have the experience of housework.’ She winks awkwardly.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and wander off into the sitting room where dust lies thickly spread over all the surfaces, inviting the calligraphy that will expose the polished wood beneath. On which of these surfaces would I write my guilty secret? I would not dare. Not here where Mother sat in the late afternoons, after the wind had dropped, her voice rumbling distantly through the phlegm, her mouth opening and closing frog-like as she snapped up the air. Here she sat to recover her breath before dusting, her asthmatic breathing filling the room, her face uplifted as if God squatted just there, above, on the other side of the galvanised iron roof. And inside, below, always the tap-tap of the roof as the iron contracted, tap-tap like huge drops of rain falling individually, deliberately. But drops of rain would sizzle on the hot iron and roll off evaporating, hissing as they rolled. So merely the sound of molecular arrangement in the falling temperature of the iron. Even now that ceilings have been put in, still a tap-tap that stops and a silence followed by a tap-shudder-tap for all the world as if she were still sitting there gasping for breath with her God just on the other side.

  Aunt Nettie bustles in with the duster.

  ‘Unbelievable all this dust; how it gets in I’ll never know. I don’t know why your father doesn’t move somewhere cool where there’s also grass.’

  She dusts well, with a practised hand – that is, if the criteria for dusting are indeed speed and agility. Her right wrist flicks the duster of dyed ostrich feathers across surfaces, the left hand moving simultaneously, lifting, before the duster flicks, and then replacing ornaments. Feathers flutter across the glazed faces of Jesus, the Queen Mother in her youth, Oupa Shenton and the picture of an English thatched cottage in the Karroo headed with the flourished scroll of Home Sweet Home. There is no hesitation in her hand. She removes dust just as she has removed from her memory the early years as a servant when she learned to dust with speed. Not that she would ever lose sight of those attributes that lifted her out of the madam’s kitchen, the pale skin and smooth wavy hair that won her a teacher for a husband.

  Aunt Nettie caresses her hair with her right hand as she passes with the duster into the bedroom. What will I do next? If I were to follow her, I’d land back on the stoep where they sit in the cooling afternoon.

  ‘I think,’ I shout after her, ‘I’ll go down to the river again.’

  ‘Yes Meisie,’ she agrees, ‘and then come and rest with us on the stoep. The wind is lying down and soon it’ll be lovely outside.’

  I sprint past the others and Father shouts, ‘Be careful of puff adders. They often come out when the wind drops.’

  What nonsense! He did not stumble over the words. He has, after all, said it before. No doubt he will say it again. Or fabricate some other dangers: lions in the veld, man-eating plants, and perhaps it is not awkwardness at all, not simply a desire to drop sounds into the great silence between us. It is the father’s assertion that he knows best.

  Their words, all their words, buzz like a drove of persistent gnats about my ears. I no longer have any desire to find the gorra. I have done with sentimental nonsense about water spirits. They have long since been choked to death. Th
e fissure of the river offers mere escape.

  Ignoring the path, I scramble down the bank and remain sitting where the sliding earth comes to rest. Before me, between two trickles of water, a mule brays. It struggles in what must be a stretch of quicksand. Transformed by fear its ears alert into quivering conductors of energy. With a lashing movement of the ears, the bray stretches into an eerie whistle. It balances on its hind legs like an ill-trained circus animal, the front raised, the belly flashing white as it staggers in a grotesque dance. When the hind legs plummet deep into the sand, the front drops in search of equilibrium. Then, holding its head high, the animal remains quite still as it sinks.

  Birds dart and swoop through the pliant Jan Twakkie branches, and a donkey stirs from its sleep, braying.

  He did not say, ‘Beware of the quicksand.’ Not that I would ever tell what I have seen in the river today.

  BEHIND THE BOUGAINVILLEA

  The papery panicles of bougainvillea rustle in an unexpected play of breeze. From the top of the whitewashed wall it tumbles, armfuls of exuberant purple blossom. And below, the group of people stir, shift from one buttock to another, shake an ankle or ease a shoulder before settling back into a sprawling cluster of bodies. Except for the faces, turned to meet the scrunch of my shoes on the gravel.

  I pull an ambiguous face so that it can be seen as either greeting or grimace. This is after all a doctor’s surgery and I could well be in pain. I am abjectly grateful for the response, which I take in with a careless glance. Some purse their lips but nod, others mutter or grunt their greeting and smiling young child pipes a clear, ‘Môre Antie’ at me.