Zebra Horizon

by Gunda Hardegen-Brunner

  *

  “Didn’t it make you homesick?” Denzil asked me while he opened his side of the air con in the Chev.

  “You mean that German Club thing last night?”

  “Ja, that whole German zack zack, korrekt, umpah ambiance.”

  “Listen Denzil, we are not all the time zack zack, korrekt and oompah. In fact we’ve got a word, gemütlich, which I don’t think can be translated into any other language, really. In English it would be a combination of comfy, friendly, informal…uh…cosy, pleasant, relaxed…and that is exactly like it was last night; and no, it didn’t make me homesick. And you know why?” I put my hand on his thigh.

  Denzil changed gears and asked: “Why?”

  I warbled: “‘cause life’s a bowl of cherries and I’m much too happy here.” I burst out laughing. Denzil put his hand on my knee and squeezed. I wished this moment could last forever. Denzil and I so close and sharing something special.

  We turned into Forresters Hill, V.B.’s oldest, larniest suburb; all quiet streets lined by huge trees, wide grassy sidewalks with flower beds and hibiscus bushes, large houses behind high hedges in manicured gardens. Uniformed gardeners were walking pedigreed hounds on long leeches and other gardeners were weeding and watering flowerbeds and sweeping stately drive ways.

  “I just want to drop off some stuff here,” Denzil turned into a place that looked like a Tudor country estate except for the tropical plants and the tortoises on the lawn. 2 Great Danes stormed towards us and only stopped barking when we got out of the Chev and Denzil talked to them. There was a brass knocker on the front door. A maid in a black uniform with a white apron let us in. Inside, everything looked mighty classy and expensive; antiques and paintings all over the show, and I dug my toes into the splendid thick carpets. The maid led the way to the ‘kitchen’, an enormous space, where old fashioned utensils and Oregon pine furniture were tastefully combined with the latest gadgets. A kitchen boy was cleaning vegetables and a heavenly smell rose from some big pots on the stove.

  “Madam,” the maid called, and she said something full of clicks to the kitchen boy.

  The Madam came out of what must have been the pantry, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was the red haired woman I had seen with Denzil in the Chev the previous day. She looked like out of a Botticelli painting, only more mature, and of course she had some clothes on. Denzil kissed her on the cheek and then he introduced us. “Victoria, meet Mathilda from Germany. Mathilda, this is Victoria my godmother.”

  The mystery woman – his godmother!

  I felt like having a laugh attack but I pulled myself together, walked up to Victoria and also kissed her on the cheek. If Victoria was surprised she didn’t show it.

  Denzil said: “I’ve got some stuff in the car.”

  Victoria asked the maid to call Jordan to help carry.

  Denzil went with the maid. Victoria stirred some herbs into one of the pots, checked the vegetables the boy had cut and turned to me, a big smile on her face. I grinned back at her, absolutely stunned. This was the first time I experienced a person from a painting moving around in flesh and blood. I was dying to know what Denzil and she had been doing the previous day; something Denzil called ‘stuff’ and didn’t want to talk about to me.

  Victoria said: “It’s such a beautiful day, let’s go out on the stoep.”

  From the stoep one could see a row of casuarinas trees at the end of the garden, and behind it a stretch of beach and the Indian Ocean. Denzil and a black guy came round the back of the house, each of them carrying a box. They walked along the side of a tennis court, over a big stretch of lawn to a little white washed cottage, surrounded by enormous rhododendrons.

  Victoria lit a cigarette and talked about her trips overseas. She had been to just about every country in Europe, except Iceland, where she planned to go in the near future, to see the aurora borealis. She asked me some questions about the status of the Turks in Germany, and, to my total surprise, she was better informed about the subject than I.

  How come a woman living in the lap of luxury at the tip of Africa knows so much about foreign workers in Germany?

  I was highly intrigued.

  Denzil joined us and told Victoria that he’d put everything in the little backroom.

  “Thank you, Denzil,” she smiled at him. “That’s very kind of you. Would Mathilda and you like to have lunch with me? You know Alistair is on a business trip in Johannesburg and I would enjoy company, especially yours.” She turned to me. “Alistair is my husband. He goes on these business trips at least once a month. It sometimes gets a bit lonely with him and all the kids out of the house.”

  I looked at Denzil. What did he want?

  “You choose, Mathilda,” he said. “And with Victoria you don’t have to stand on ceremony. You sommer say what you want.”

  “Ja, I’d like to have lunch here.”

  Because Victoria seems to be a highly interesting person…and mebbe I can find out something about Denzil’s and her secret.

  “Okay,” Denzil said, “that’s fine with me.”

  Victoria smiled and seemed somehow relieved. “Let’s see,” she glanced at her platinum watch. “It’s 10 o’clock now. I have to drop off some clothes at the orphanage and then I want to pop in at Larry’s. He is lying in bed with flu, the poor man. And with the speed he reads, he needs a new supply of books every second day. Hm, I’ll be back at about 12. Is that okay with you?”

  “Ja, perfect,” Denzil said. “We wanted to go to the beach anyway.”

  “Oh, you can go to the beach right here,” Victoria said. “And there is the swimming pool and the tennis court, and I’ve got the latest jazz records in the sun room. Denzil, you know where everything is. Make yourselves at home.”

  She left in a swish of designer clothes, kissing us both on the cheek as if our presence really made a difference to her.

  There was nobody else on the beach. Denzil and I hopped around in the waves, pausing for saltwatery kisses. The triangular sails of a yacht slid past on the horizon and when we got out of the water, a family of cormorants was drying their wings on a barnacle-covered rock. We walked up the beach hand in hand and stopped at the casuarina trees to look at the big Southern Ocean, an endless expanse of dancing blues reflecting the golden lights of the sun.

  Denzil’s body tensed against mine. “Let’s go to the cottage,” he whispered.

  Goosebumps rose all over my skin. “What for?” But I didn’t really need to ask the question. I already knew. I squeezed Denzil’s hand and smiled at him, utterly amazed at myself. I knew exactly what I wanted and how to go about it.

  We walked up amongst the flower beds. “I just want to get something out of the car,” I said.

  “Are you by any chance talking about…uh…this?” Denzil pulled a packet of condoms out of his pocket.

  “Ja.” I never understood why I felt so totally in control.

  We walked slowly to the cottage. I felt Denzil against me and I wanted him as close as possible, merge, melt into each other, be one.

  Later we chucked the used condom into the ocean like an offering and the current carried it away. I thought of my great-grandmother whose ashes had been dispersed into the sea. Life and death…an endless cycle…and now I felt as a part of it like never before.

  Back in the house I checked myself in the mirror – I looked still the same. I thought the hype about the act of becoming a woman was largely exaggerated, but I felt different in my skin, ready to play my part in the world. There was also a new huge smile that welled up from somewhere inside me and radiated through my entire being.

  Victoria walked in pale faced and shaking all over. She looked at us with huge eyes, not saying one word, and collapsed into one of the armchairs.

  Denzil jumped up and darted towards her. “What’s the matter, Victoria?” he put an arm around her. “What happened?”

  “The cat…I opened the front door…and there was a dead cat with its innards scattered all ov
er Larry’s drive way…it was horrible.”

  Victoria looked into Denzil’s eyes as if there she could find an answer, and Denzil looked back into hers – they were sharing something I didn’t know about. I was sure it had something to do with their ‘secret’.

  What on earth is it?

  “Is Larry okay?” Denzil sounded really worried.

  Victoria bit her lip and sighed.

  “Maybe I should get you a drink,” Denzil suggested.

  “Mmh,” Victoria nodded, still biting her lip.

  All of a sudden she straightened up. “Make it a double tequila – and forget about the lemon and the salt.” She downed her drink one shot, put the glass down with a bang and said: “The bastards.”

  “That looks more like you,” Denzil said. “Full of the fighting spirit.”

  “The bastards,” Victoria said again. “I went to drop off those books at Larry’s – he’s feeling much better – and we had a good old chat, and when I left, there was…there was…that cat…”

  “Shit,” Denzil growled.

  “How come the guts were all over the place?” I asked.

  Denzil and Victoria exchanged another one of those glances.

  “Somebody cut the belly open,” Victoria said after a couple of seconds of silence.

  “Hell,” I was shocked. “Who would do something like that, and how did the cat get there?”

  Another glance.

  “Anybody could have thrown it there from the road.” Denzil got up. “I’ve got some stuff to do. Mathilda, you keep Victoria company.” It sounded like an order.

  “Denzil, please be careful,” Victoria said.

  “Of course I’ll be careful,” Denzil said with an encouraging smile. Then he was gone.

  Victoria sat all crumpled up in her chair, her eyes blinking with tears.

  What is going on here?

  I was totally perplexed. Nothing in my so-called education had prepared me for this. But since this morning things had changed. I got up and walked over to Victoria and took her in my arms. She cried and cried and I held her, feeling as old and strong as Mother Earth herself. I knew I could do anything.

  When Denzil returned, we were sitting in the sunroom listening to Mozart. Victoria had told me that The Magical Flute was good for her nerves. One of the Great Danes was lying at her feet and sunrays were painting radiant patterns on the potted palms.

  “I buried the cat,” Denzil said as he sat down next to me. “Everything is all right.”

  I wondered what these words could possibly mean.

  We had a delicious lunch and talked about everything except what interested me most – the cat. Denzil and Victoria exchanged more of their mysterious glances and I started to get irritated. Denzil squeezed my hand and suddenly it dawned on me that for some reason, they were doing it for me. They too were dying to discuss the cat, but because I was there, we concentrated on our various travels and the whale that had been stranded on the beach.

  I waited until Denzil and I were back on the road. I moved across the wide bench of the Chev until I was sitting so close to him that my knees were underneath the gearshift. “Denzil, can we talk?”

  He turned his head. I looked into his eyes and I could see the pain in his face.

  “Sometimes it is safer not to know.”

  “Do you know what it feels like not to know? Denzil, we have shared so much. Why can’t you tell me about …the cat?”

  A sigh went through his body and his shoulders slumped.

  “Denzil, this whole thing is driving me crazy.”

  There was another sigh before he slowed down and turned into a sandy track that led down to the beach. He stopped on a windblown, lonely parking spot. He stared out at the ocean and I stared at him.

  “You’ve heard about the Bantu Education Act?” he finally asked.

  “Ja, it’s a special curriculum for black pupils. Most people say it’s ‘specially adapted to black culture as if it was actually a good thing, but some have told me that it is a curriculum to keep those black kids who do go to school as uneducated as possible. I don’t know what to believe. It’s like with so many things in this country. You never know where the propaganda stops and where the truth starts, and there is nowhere to check.”

  “Ja, I know. It must be confusing for somebody who hasn’t grown up here and been indoctrinated from the day they were born.” Denzil was still staring into the waves. “The long and the short of the Bantu Education Act is that it is a limited curriculum for blacks to condition them to accept an inferior status in life. The government doesn’t want them to aspire to anything more than to be labourers and gardeners and mine workers and maids. There is no black person in South Africa who has a superior position to a white, and the Nats – and I think most of the whites – want it to stay that way. There were a few excellent mission schools where black kids used to get a first class education; that was up to 1953 when the Bantu Education Act came in.” Denzil turned to me. “Now the Minister of Native Affairs can close black schools where they don’t stick to that curriculum.”

  “What a crazy, destructive place this is…but what has the Bantu Education Act got to do with the cat?”

  “A lot,” Denzil frowned. “Larry, the guy Victoria visited this morning, is doing his bit to support black schools beyond the official black curriculum. It’s totally illegal, of course, and the Special Branch of the police has probably been watching him for a while. The cat was a warning. They do that every now and then. Strangle ‘traitors’’ dogs and hang them on the letter box, drive past the ‘enemy’s’ house and shoot a couple of window panes out…”

  Goosebumps crept up the back of my neck. “Denzil, if the Special Branch is watching Larry then they’ve seen you go to his place.” Even though I was sitting I felt my knees going wobbly. “Are they…are they also watching you?”

  “No,” he replied with something that was meant to be a reassuring grin.

  “And Victoria?”

  “No ways.” He squeezed my thigh. “They concentrate on the heavy guys. They can’t watch every visitor. They haven’t got the work force.”

  The next day I had Kim stay over after school. On Grandpa’s lucky day Kim’s gating had been lifted with the do at the German Club and things were back to normal. Shit shot Dougie got away Scot free because the Jamesons never laid a charge against him. We spent the afternoon polishing my speech.

  “Here we go. Final sentence. Finished.” Kim threw the pen over her shoulder. It landed on Doodles who took off like a shot.

  “Hell Kim, have you got Russian ancestors or what? Because the Russians also throw things over their shoulders, ‘specially glasses after they’ve finished a drink.”

  “As far as I know my ancestors came from Scotland and Austria with a couple of French thrown in.”

  I gathered my speech, which was scattered all over the table. “What do you know about the Special Branch?”

  “Huh? The Special Branch?” Kim scratched her head. “They catch communists and Russians and subversive blacks and protect the country from underground movements and stuff.”

  In the evening I asked Ludwig. He put his sailing magazine down and said: “All I know is that the Special Branch was created to deal with political dissidents and that you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them because they’ve got unlimited power.”

  All of a sudden a thought shot crystal clear through my mind: the brick at Denzil’s place the other day – it hadn’t been thrown by rebellious kids or by a neighbour who didn’t like Kaffirboeties; that brick had been a warning – like the cat!

  At the painting competition Julie got the third prize for her Chagallistic oeuvre ‘A Real Mensch’.

  “Looks like the jury is more into conservative stuff,” I said to Ludwig while Julie, with a forced smile, collected a food hamper worth a 100 Rand.

  The winner, a Mrs Delia Jackman, had produced a not very inspiring conventional landscape ‘View from Settlers’ Cross towards the O
lifant Hills’. She pressed her voucher for 2 plane tickets to Paris to her stately bosom and kept on saying: “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.”

  The second prize, a booze hamper worth 200 Rand, went to Commander Gerry Hewitt for ‘The Seventh Wave at Seagull Reef’. After the final thank you from the chairman of the V.B. Art Society to ‘Johnson, Peter and Sons, Leaders in Leatherware’, who had donated some of the prizes, everybody went for drinks and snacks to the tea garden of the museum. The tea garden was situated in and around the former mews of the property. In the museum pamphlet they were described as a magnificent example of the transition from Victorian to Edwardian architecture.

  I went for a stroll through the museum to have a look at some art. The V.B. collection consisted of 3 paintings by English artists, a portrait of Henry the Navigator by somebody unknown and 2 water paints showing barges on the Seine by the French painter A. Douay, who had stopped over in V.B. during his circumnavigation in 1968. There were also some expressive animal paintings by one John Smith who had arrived in Southern Africa with the 1820 settlers.

  When I joined the crowd in the tea garden, Julie had nearly digested the fact that she hadn’t won the prize to Paris. She passed me a glass of guava juice and said: “Pity you didn’t exhibit yourself, Mathilda,” referring to my blubsh some time ago.

  Ha ha

  Instead of participating in the painting competition I had concentrated on Denzil – and I still didn’t know what was going on in his life, nor what kind of ‘stuff’ he was busy with, even like this morning and every Saturday since we had met.

  I drank my juice and went back to the exhibition. Puppies sleeping in their basket, a ship arriving in the harbour, the town hall in early morning light, kids playing on the beach, granny on her riempie chair…nothing depicting flying bricks and strangled cats.