by Ekow Duker
‘Can you tell us what happened?’ Karabo asked Fezeka. She did her best to keep her voice as gentle as possible.
When the little girl nodded but still didn’t speak, Precious yelled at her in frustration. ‘Don’t you have a mouth?’
Teacher held up a hand to stop Precious’s hysteria from spewing over.
‘What happened, Fezeka? How did you get into the yard?’
‘She must have climbed over the gate,’ Karabo said.
Teacher’s eyebrows arched in surprise. ‘And Saddam just let her in?’
Precious shrieked in frustration. ‘Why are we talking about that stupid creature? Don’t you know he is useless as a guard dog?’ She turned to Fezeka and glowered at the little girl. ‘You’d better tell us what happened before I lose my temper.’
The girl cast her eyes down at the table. She appeared to be studying the grain in the wood.
‘Aunt Thembeka beat me,’ she said in a small voice.
But her revelation only incensed Precious even more. ‘Fezeka! Fezeka!’ she cried. ‘You woke us up at this hour because Thembeka beat you? Come here, I will beat you myself!’
Fezeka buried her head in her arms and began to sob. It was then Karabo saw the deep cut on the back of her neck. The blood had clotted around it but the edges of the wound were white and fleshy against the darkness of her skin. The back of her dress was ripped and caked with dried blood.
‘Look, Fezeka is hurt,’ Karabo said.
Teacher leaned over the kitchen table to see for himself.
‘Take Fezeka to the bathroom and wash her,’ he said swiftly. ‘There’s antiseptic in the cupboard.’
Karabo stood up and led Fezeka away to the bathroom. She left the door open so she could hear her parents’ conversation.
‘You really must put Thembeka in a home,’ Teacher said. ‘It’s not right for her to be in the care of a ten-year-old child.’
Her mother’s answer was bitter and swift. ‘You know we don’t have money for a home.’
‘I don’t mean a private home,’ her father replied. ‘The government has places for people like Thembeka.’
‘You mean I should send my sister away to die?’
For once Teacher had nothing to say. They’d been talking on the radio the other day about how terrible state facilities for the elderly could be. Some frail care homes were little more than perverted hospices, places where an inmate’s last days were made as hellish as possible through ignorance, neglect and a lack of funds.
‘At least send her to live with an older relative,’ Teacher said at last. ‘A girl Fezeka’s age should be in school.’
‘You know Thembeka won’t leave that house,’ Precious cried. ‘And even if she would, no one will take her. Not even you!’
Teacher didn’t have an answer to that either. ‘We have no space here,’ he said dully and from Precious’s sudden silence, Karabo knew they both knew he was lying.
‘Let’s go and see Thembeka,’ Teacher said. ‘Maybe we can talk some sense to her this time.’
And that was the barest lie of all.
Aunt Thembeka lived just outside Mthatha on the way to Langeni. By the time they got there, the sun was crouched right above Teacher’s car. It wasn’t that far to travel but then again, Teacher’s car was very slow. They’d had to stop at the Engen garage to buy Fezeka some sweets because she’d become very agitated when she realised they were taking her back to Aunt Thembeka. When Teacher handed her a KitKat through the rear window, a strange resignation came over her. She nestled against Karabo on the back seat and sucked slowly on the chocolate-covered wafer. She sat staring at the back of Teacher’s head all the way to Aunt Thembeka’s house.
To their surprise, Father Majola was already there when they arrived. He was the priest from the All Saints Cathedral in Mthatha. Even though he was not wearing his robes, Karabo thought Father Majola was terribly impressive. He was a thickset man, built like a retired heavyweight boxer. He had large hands and a bald, polished head. And when he spoke his voice soared and dipped in the style of a Baptist preacher. It was quite wonderful to listen to him, even if he was only saying good morning.
Father Majola clasped Teacher’s hand in both of his.
‘What a terrible thing to happen to Thembeka,’ he said. He held onto Teacher’s hand so intently it was as though he were reassuring himself that Teacher could be trusted and would not run away.
‘This is Precious, my wife,’ Teacher said. ‘Thembeka’s elder sister.’
He stepped back to allow Precious her moment with Father Majola. Unlike the many families in the Eastern Cape who had an age-old allegiance to the Methodist church, the Mtakwendas had always been Catholic. It was only much later in life that Precious had swung away to the Latter Day Church of Holy Fire, dragging Karabo and Teacher along with her. Thembeka had remained Catholic. That must be why Father Majola had come.
Precious simpered and curtsied like a little girl. ‘Thank you for coming, Father.’
‘Oh, but I had to,’ Father Majola replied in a deep baritone. ‘Thembeka is like my very own daughter. In a manner of speaking, of course. There are others in the parish with dementia but they are all much older than her. For them, it is almost expected that their minds should wander.’
Then he shook Karabo’s hand and Fezeka’s too. He would have rubbed the top of Karabo’s head if she hadn’t ducked. Her mother glared at her for such impertinence but Father Majola just laughed. The deep rolling chuckle seemed to rise effortlessly from his feet.
One by one, they trooped into Aunt Thembeka’s house with Father Majola leading the way. As the doorway was quite narrow, Father Majola had to turn himself sideways and even then he struggled to wriggle through. Karabo and Teacher, on the other hand, stooped to avoid bumping their heads on the lintel. Only Precious and Fezeka passed through the doorway without any difficulty.
It was several months since Karabo had last seen Aunt Thembeka and she dreaded what she would find. She sniffed the air for the sharp tell-tale smell of shit but thankfully there was none. The house was small but surprisingly neat inside, with family pictures in matching frames arranged on a wooden counter.
There was one of Precious and Teacher in black, grey and white, both of them standing to attention on the steps of the church in Mthatha where they had been married. Next to them was a picture of uTatomkhulu leaning out of the driver’s cabin of a locomotive. He had all his hair then. And although the photo was faded and old, uTatomkhulu’s eyes were bright with possibility. Now they were just dark and empty. The most poignant photo, however, was one of Aunt Thembeka herself. She was dressed in baggy overalls with a patterned bandana tied around her head. There were two similarly dressed men on either side of her, their arms linked protectively through hers. The three of them were leaning forward and it looked as if they might tumble out of the wooden frame at any moment. Above them was a sign that read ‘Mercedes-Benz South Africa. A Daimler Plant’.
Aunt Thembeka was sitting quietly in her chair. She had always been the more attractive of the two sisters. Her hair was pulled back to expose a fine, delicately proportioned face and she sat upright with seeming confidence. But then she saw her visitors and began to giggle uncontrollably. They could have been a band of comedians who’d come to perform just for her.
Precious ran to her sister and knelt by her side. She stroked Thembeka’s face and talked to her as if she were a small child, which to all intents and purposes, she was.
Father Majola laid his hand on Precious’s shoulder. ‘I must pray with your sister alone.’
‘But, Father,’ Precious said, ‘we’ve come all this way. Let us pray together. Didn’t Jesus say where two or three are gathered in my name there I will be also?’
She looked away, embarrassed at having quoted scripture to a man of the cloth, but Father Majola nodded gravely.
‘Very well.’ Father Majola took the chair next to Aunt Thembeka and indicated that the others should sit in a circle around hi
m holding hands.
‘May we all bow our heads,’ he intoned.
He began to pray. The rich timbre of his words was wonderfully hypnotic. As Karabo listened to the melody of Father Majola’s phrasing, her eyes grew heavy and her head slipped onto her chest. Then all of a sudden she felt Fezeka’s fingernails dig into her palm. Startled, Karabo opened her eyes and looked at Fezeka. Before she could ask what the matter was, the little girl jerked her head urgently in Father Majola’s direction. His hand was underneath Aunt Thembeka’s cloth and wedged firmly between her thighs. His eyes were shut tight and as he prayed, Aunt Thembeka hummed and giggled quietly to herself. She looked as if this were the most commonplace occurrence in the world.
Karabo nudged Teacher with her knee. He looked at her and Fezeka and then at Father Majola.
‘Do something!’ Karabo mouthed to her father.
Teacher’s mouth opened and closed but no words came out. Strangely, his vast vocabulary appeared to have deserted him. Karabo slumped back in her seat, overcome with despair. Then Father Majola was holding Aunt Thembeka’s hand in the air and crying out in triumph, ‘Amen, Amen, Amen!’
Dazed, Karabo shook her hand out of Teacher’s grip and stood up. She felt as though she were not really there, but had been watching the gathering from the very edge of space. She left the house and sat in the car while her parents said their goodbyes to Father Majola. But the priest came up to the car and seized Karabo’s hand through the open window. He looked extraordinarily pleased with himself.
‘Karabo, is it?’ he said. ‘I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. And about the wonderful work your father is doing in our school.’
He had large hands and stubby fingers that each sprouted a small thicket of dark, wiry hairs. There was the trace of something sticky and viscous on his fingers, as if he’d dipped them in slow-drying glue. And as he pumped Karabo’s hand, she pictured his fingers scrabbling inside Aunt Thembeka and wondered if he’d used one finger or two.
Teacher waited for Father Majola to drive out first. His car, a brightly polished Morris, was much like Father Majola himself: large, immaculate and surprisingly nimble. They watched it manoeuvre easily out of the narrow driveway and out into the road where it was swallowed by a dip in the valley.
‘Are you all right?’ Precious asked Teacher gently.
He looked at her as if he did not know who she was. ‘What did you say?’
‘I can see you’re overwhelmed by Thembeka’s condition. Or was it the service Father Majola conducted?’
‘Does Father Majola visit Thembeka often?’ Teacher asked roughly. ‘It is a very long way for him to come.’
Precious clapped her hands in delight. ‘What does the distance matter?’ she gushed. ‘Tell me, where have you ever seen a man like that? Such concern is so rare these days …’
Her voice disappeared into a pink fog of Father Majola adulation. It seemed that if Father Majola had asked her right then to take off her skirt so he could walk on it, she would have done so without hesitation. But Teacher didn’t say another word. As he drove, Karabo saw his head move, trying several times to catch her eye in the rear-view mirror, but she kept her face turned to the side. She’d been used to looking up at her father in the heavens. Now she was looking down at him in the muck.
CHAPTER 11
The sound of a car engine ruffled the still sheet that lay over the valley. André put his violin down with a frown. He’d come to appreciate playing out in the open with only the birds and the occasional buck for an audience. He was older now and there was a particular spot he enjoyed most. He’d found a shadowy copse of sweet-thorn trees at the bottom of a steep embankment. It was in walking distance from the house so he did not have to drive. The trees were huddled together so closely that their branches interlocked and their rounded crowns formed an unbroken canopy. He’d stumbled upon it by accident after yet another fight with his mother over his plans to emigrate to England. He’d stormed out of the house that day and left her on the doorstep, crying and calling out his name.
That was a few years ago now and he still hadn’t left. At first it was his mother’s hysterics that kept him in Mthatha; then it was the comfort of the routine he’d slipped into.
Beneath the trees André would lie naked in the grass, looking up at the vast expanse of the heavens, with his violin in one hand and masturbating with the other. It was stubbornly dissatisfying each time, but it was the only way he knew to relive the sheer ecstasy that consumed him whenever the angels appeared.
Suddenly André thought he heard a man’s voice. Or perhaps it was a woman’s. And then the flailing of a car engine that refuses to respond. It was an unwelcome intrusion because he regarded the small wooded area as his very own. Quickly, he put his violin back in its case and pulled on his clothes. He’d come to this part of the woods so often, his feet had pressed a pathway into the earth. He scrambled up the path and lay down behind the curtain of tall grass at the edge of the tarmac.
He saw a tall man with uncommonly black skin bent under the hood of a car. His wife, for it had to be his wife, was much shorter and she was visibly agitated. Her hands were balled into fists and she held them angrily against her hips. She paced up and down like a soldier on guard duty, taking a few small steps one way before turning and going back in the opposite direction.
André knew a little about cars and he thought of going up to help. But he experienced a keen, illicit pleasure in watching them so he stayed crouched in his hiding place a few metres away.
‘The engine needs to cool, that’s all,’ the man said. He spoke in English and, given the situation, was preternaturally calm. One would have thought that his car broke down every other day.
His wife stopped pacing for a moment. ‘Don’t you see how embarrassing this is?’ she cried in a shrill voice. ‘We can never go anywhere without breaking down at the roadside. When will you buy another car?’
The man unlatched the hood and let it fall with a loud clang. And that was when André saw the girl. She was tall, almost as tall as the man. He’d always found it difficult to tell a black girl’s age but she couldn’t be more than eighteen. But then she wasn’t really black at all. Her hair framed her head in a copper-coloured halo and her face was an unusually light shade of peach.
‘Did you hear it?’ the girl asked.
‘Hear what?’ the woman snapped. ‘We’re stuck at the side of the road. This is no time to be dreaming.’
The girl stepped into the road and André flattened himself against the embankment. There was a coltish awkwardness about her and yet she walked with the poise of a much older woman. She seemed to be looking directly at him.
‘Someone was playing music. I heard it.’
‘In the bush? There’s no one here except us,’ the woman said impatiently.
The girl took a few steps forward and stopped in the middle of the road.
‘It sounded like a violin,’ she said.
All of a sudden the man, realising the girl was in the path of oncoming traffic, hurried across to her.
‘Karabo!’ he cried.
But for some reason, he stopped before he caught up with her. A strange shyness seemed to come over him, as if he did not know what to do or what was expected of him. It was a few moments before he roused himself. Then he took her by the arm and steered her gently back to the car.
André slid back into the bushes. He plucked the burrs off his shirt and trousers and made his way back to the house and his now familiar life. There were not many violinists around Mthatha and it had not been difficult for him to find work. He still gave violin lessons to Mrs Harrison and also, now, to a handful of her friends. She had not progressed much beyond Twinkle Twinkle Little Star but neither she nor André seemed to mind. Parents asked him to teach their children and he accepted their commissions with feigned reluctance. He’d even begun to play at weddings. As expected, there were not many families who could afford him but he charged those who could, enough to mak
e up for all those who couldn’t. And to his surprise, André discovered he didn’t mind playing at weddings after all. On occasion, he actually enjoyed them. The couple and their guests invariably knew next to nothing about music so he could play a little carelessly and no one was any the wiser. What was more, it was easy money and that eased the atmosphere at home considerably.
With the money he gave his mother, she bought herself a few new clothes, light cotton dresses in an assortment of colours. That pleased André because he had begun to tire of her creeping about the house like a mortician’s assistant. Marietjie even began baking again and in the afternoons the inviting smell of fresh bread swaddled the house.
Gradually, the thought of moving to London lost its urgency. Marietjie’s repeated warnings about the English took hold in André’s mind and as he was inherently lazy, he let himself be persuaded. He told himself he would go in the summer but then summer became winter and he began to look forward to spring. No one bothered them in Mthatha and the memories of Bloemfontein receded a little further every day. He hadn’t made any friends but then he didn’t want any. He was perfectly happy by himself. So he spoke less and less about London and Marietjie took care not to remind him. They didn’t speak about the engele either.
André might not have gone to London at all if it hadn’t been for Father Majola. He’d been asked to play at a wedding for a black woman from Johannesburg, a hard-charging corporate type who drove a blue Ford Mustang with a white racing stripe down the middle. She’d grown up in Mthatha and had her heart set on an elaborate outdoor wedding with the Wild Coast as her backdrop. André didn’t usually meet the brides before the wedding day itself, preferring to have his instructions relayed to him through a wedding co-ordinator, but this woman insisted on talking to him directly. They arranged to meet one afternoon in a modest coffee shop in the centre of Mthatha.
‘I want you to play “Ave Maria”,’ the bride-to-be announced the moment she sat down. She was late but made no apology for her tardiness. She had a thin face with a large obstinate mouth that laughed frequently, even when there was nothing to laugh about.
