by Andre Brink
‘Have you thought about university?’ I ask.
‘Ai, Miss Kristien,’ says Trui, ‘and where must the money then come from?’
‘Ma,’ he says in a warning tone of voice, without looking up.
‘Things may change after the elections,’ I say brightly.
‘Like how?’ Hostility burns in his tone, but at least he has answered.
‘I don’t know. But I’m sure there’ll be more opportunities, openings, possibilities. We can find out if you like.’
’We?’ It is an open sneer. The puffiness of his face has subsided but it still looks bruised; his eyes, one bloodshot, glare at me in defiance.
It comes close to unnerving me, but I press on. ‘Well, I can try to speak to some people –’ Suddenly it sounds such a ‘white’ thing to say that it makes me feel sick.
He says nothing, merely sits there waiting heavily, challenging, smouldering.
There is no backing out now. ‘I used to work for the ANC when I first went overseas,’ I say, fixing my eyes on Jonnie. Jeremiah hasn’t moved. Trui has stopped drying the plate she has just rinsed.
He still remains silent, but something in his look has changed. Trui is the one who says, ‘Haai, Miss Kristien, but they’re mos a lot of terrorists.’
‘You’re behind the times, Ma,’ Jonnie snaps at her.
‘Hey, you watch your tongue!’ says Jeremiah. ‘You don’t say things like that to your mother.’ Then, meekly, helplessly, at me, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Kristien.’
I give up. ‘Look,’ I say, pushing back my chair, ‘let’s not get into an argument about it. All I’m saying is that I’d like to help Jonnie if we can think of something. Right now there are other things to be done.’ I get up, avoiding the young man’s eyes. ‘I have to go to town. Trui, can you help me make a list of things we need for the house?’
Without pausing to take a breath, as if she has been waiting for this moment all along, Trui starts reeling off in a monotone voice, marking each item with a flick of her cloth, ‘Jik, Handy Andy, Omo, Sunlight Liquid, Bisto, more milk, juice, oats, flour, salt, black pepper, rice, mealie meal, and then we’ll need some meat and vegetables –’
‘Wait!’ I stop her, overwhelmed. ‘I must get my pen and some paper, it’s upstairs –’
‘It’s all here,’ she says, turning to pick up a sheet of notepaper from the window-sill behind her.
‘Miss Kristien.’ This time it is Jeremiah. ‘We must get other wheels. It is not a good thing to drive to town in that death wagon.’ He makes a motion with his grizzled head.
‘But you’ve been doing it all these years.’
‘This is not the right time.’
‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’
‘I tell you this is not the right time.’ Below his humble demeanour I sense the bedrock of his will.
‘I’m sorry.’ This is exasperating. ‘You really must try to understand.’
‘There is the old horse-cart in the shed.’
‘No!’ I say emphatically. ‘It’s more than twenty kilometres in to town. We don’t have all day. And anyway’ – triumphantly – ‘we don’t have horses any more.’
‘But there are ostriches,’ he says, unperturbed.
I gawk at him. For a moment, for the sheer hell of it, I am tempted. But – regrettably, perhaps? – sanity prevails. ‘Out of the question,’ I tell him.
‘I don’t drive that death wagon.’
‘I’ve been driving it for the last few days, I’ll drive it again.’
‘That was different. Now you’re living here. I cannot give you the keys, Miss Kristien. The old Missus say it’s my job to drive, so I drive.’
‘Dammit, Pa, give her the keys!’ says Jonnie suddenly.
We all stare at him in surprise.
After a long silence Jeremiah turns to me again with all the dignity he can muster. ‘You get your things,’ he tells me. ‘I shall drive you.’
4
ON MY OWN, under less pressure than on my previous visits, I rediscover, below the garish veneer of new affluence and the overall tastelessness of the modernised sprawling town, the village of my youth. Some buildings have indeed disappeared, but in most cases façades have simply been ‘renovated’, traffic lights installed, garages updated and streamlined, signboards enlarged, to resemble an American frontier town. Below the surface an old-fashioned world, at an old-fashioned pace, is still going about its business. Bank, grocery store, chemist, butcher’s, bakery, home industry, Shapiro’s Fashions, church.
The bank has been jazzed up inside, but the customers still look familiar: messengers, housewives, some coloured women with their hair in large multicoloured curlers visible under a doek, a large group of farmers talking shop in the corner, the younger ones in shorts and checkered cowboy shirts and long socks, with bulging calves and biceps, the older ones in khaki, the tops of their foreheads ringed with the white shadow left by their hats. My business takes quite a while; they are not used to transactions in foreign currency, and in the end I’m told to come back tomorrow.
In the supermarket which has replaced the grocery store of my youth, I work diligently through Trui’s list before I go to the stationery section to select a sturdy black hardcover notebook, not the type in which deathless prose usually comes to life, but it will do, I guess. From darker corners at the back come memories of Saturdays when the whole flock of cousins were carted in to town on the back of Oupa’s lorry; and of the pathetic old man behind the counter, whose young wife had run away with a Brylcreemed lover. My other visits are made purely to indulge my curiosity: the chemist’s shop that used to belong to Mr MacGregor, whose eldest son electrocuted himself in my matric year when he tried to rewire his father’s house, which inspired me afterwards to tell everybody he’d been driven to it by his unrequited love for me; the butchery, run in my early childhood by a hairy giant who beat the shit out of his wife and five children every Friday night, the bloody results of which could still be witnessed on Saturdays; the bakery next door, once renowned far and wide for the lightness and airiness of its loaves, until the baker’s son, a mean-faced bastard, was caught redhanded, in a manner of speaking, wanking off into the dough (which probably, the district knowingly whispered, accounted for the self-raising qualities of his flour); the Home Industries where Aunt Mavis rose to fame with her inimitable green-fig preserve, until it was discovered that she used blue vitriol to heighten the colour.
I am still browsing among the shelves where once the figs glowed like green thoughts in a green shade when I am accosted by one of the busybody women crowding the place – ‘My goodness me, but aren’t you one of the Müller girls?’ insisting, when momentarily I feign innocence, ‘Anna’s sister, Ludwig and Louisa’s daughter?’ – the kind of invasion of my own space that immediately gets my back up. But before I can reply, reprieve comes in the form of a new arrival, a woman of formidable proportions, in purple and green, who starts gushing even as she crosses the threshold. ‘Jenny! Hannie! Freda! Have you heard the news –?’ In the black township, not an hour ago, now, now, now, she tells us, a farmer delivering mealie meal to one of the shops was stopped by a mob of demonstrators. What happened to the farmer, no one knows; there is little hope that he could have escaped. Where would a white man turn to in a black township, in these times? All that is known right now is that his bakkie was destroyed, totally burnt out, a smoking black skeleton. Honestly, these people. And what’s going to happen now? All hell is going to be let loose, of that we can be sure. Mercifully, in the cackle that follows – it’s like the night a jackal broke into Ouma’s chicken run – I manage to make my escape.
Outside, the streets still appear calm and untroubled; the stillness of the sun is reassuring even if the lump in the pit of my stomach persists like undigested cold porridge. The brightness has gone from the morning. Unnerved by the news I wander on, split between today and yesterday.
Half a block further, squeezed in between two gaudy shop windows, is the ent
rance to Issie Shapiro’s long, narrow shop which once represented the town’s notion of haute couture, defined by the Shapiro family – Issie, Miriam, and their five beautiful daughters. Yet in public they were shunned by all the Afrikaners in the district because they were Jews; except before the mayor’s annual ‘do’, when everybody would flock there to splurge on the latest imported fashions. Mother steadfastly refused ever to set foot in the place; Father was a member of the Broederbond, the fierce Brotherhood which ensured that racial purity was seen to be enforced, and under no circumstances could people like us be seen to enter the property of a family who, when all was said and done, had to bear personal responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ. Only once did I pay a visit to the shop, and that was the year when I finally managed to persuade my closest relatives that I was in dire need of my first bra. Mother, as usual, wasn’t impressed, even when I assured her she would have to bear the blame if my back became permanently hunched from the sheer weight it was expected to carry. Anna found it hilarious and chose the most inopportune moments to comment on what she disparagingly referred to as my pimples. Only Ouma took it seriously, and one fine morning commanded Jeremiah to drive her and me to town in state in the black Chrysler hearse. And she boldly marched me into Shapiro’s den of iniquity. Ouma never shared the family’s qualms about Jews. In fact, as in many of the other ostrich palaces, there has always been a special enclosure on the front stoep known as ‘the Jew’s room’, where since the feather boom any itinerant Jewish trader could move in, night or day, unbidden, to stay over until his mission on the farm was accomplished. So there was no hesitation at all in Ouma, once the matter had been decided, to accompany me boldly into Shapiro’s emporium, where we were welcomed by a flutter of ancient women exuding a heavy, heady smell of exotic powders and colognes in the dusk. I was taken into a dingy little cubicle behind a curtain and offered the choice of six or seven bras, most of them hopelessly too big. In retrospect I think Ouma, too, had trouble keeping a straight face at the sight of my nipples, which must then have been the shape, size and colour of the snouts of baby mice; but true to form she went through the whole solemn procedure, fitting and adjusting and shifting and fidgeting until I found what I thought I needed. I remember heaving a deep and demonstrative sigh as we left that measly little cubicle, and saying, ‘Ah, what a relief’; and Ouma Kristina seemed at least as proud as I was. Ever since then the place has remained in my memory the Mecca of fashion, an Aladdin’s cave of incomparable splendour. How disconcerting now, as I venture inside more from curiosity than defiance or need, to find it reduced to this narrow, ill-lit, musty, old-fashioned little hole; and still presided over by members of the same family – the likeness is unmistakable, the black, black eyes, the skin whiter-than-white, like skimmed milk, especially when compared to the recklessly sun-spoilt skins of our family – even if the recollection of yesterday’s beauties turns out to be rather less than trustworthy. Hoping that the women clustered around the counter have not recognised me, I turn back into the unsympathetic glare of the street outside.
And then the sandstone church with its white finish and tall steeple. Here I make no attempt to go closer than the gate. Those summer Sundays, relentlessly forced into scratchy show-off dresses with ribbons and bows and layers of frills, each mother striving to outdo the others with her brood; my hair drawn back so tightly into plaits that my eyes were narrowed into tearful slits. Those hot, interminable services, desultory singing (only Mother intoning at the top of her formidable soprano voice, causing the rest of us to cringe as the other cousins jostled and giggled and whispered around us), long-winded prayers, the dominee’s voice rising and falling, crescendo and diminuendo, as he spoke of fire and brimstone, wailing and gnashing of teeth, for ever and ever, fucking amen. Jesus, how I hated those Sundays! And no escape possible (except on the rarest of occasions, when I could prevail on Ouma to persuade Mother that I was sick unto death). Invariably it ended in family fights, in furious whispered threats and admonitions, often in smacks, sometimes in full-scale thrashings back home. The only diversion came on Communion Sunday when children were normally not allowed into the church but herded into the hall for a special service. But sometimes we gave that a miss and infiltrated the back of the church, to follow with awe the theatrical unfolding of the Communion, the passing of the cup, the silver platter with small cubes of dry white bread. Once or twice, usually the result of a dare, we risked (we were thoroughly convinced) our lives by tiptoeing into the vestry, afterwards, while our parents and their peers were still milling around outside to catch up with news and gossip; and we tasted some of the dregs and crumbs, curious to find out whether it would actually turn into flesh and blood; and on one memorable occasion we espied a mouse scurrying off with a morsel, and some of the smallest fry in our heathen horde stampeded round the church to the grownups shouting that the mouse had eaten Jesus, the mouse had eaten Jesus. Ever since, I have been fascinated by the problem of leftovers.
5
I MUST KNOW what has happened to that man whose bakkie has been burned out. I could go to the police, I suppose, but after being conditioned for so many years to see the police as the enemy it would seem like an act of betrayal. (But, my God, of whom? of what?) I could go into any shop, the news should be all over the town by now; but I cannot face those eager gossips. Not only because it is unlikely anyone will really know the full story, but because I shrink from the vivisection that must accompany it. My goodness me, but aren’t you one of the Müller girls? Anna’s sister, Ludwig and Louisa’s daughter – ? A simple matter of information becomes a major undertaking.
I collect my carrier bags and parcels from the supermarket and lug them to the hearse which Jeremiah has parked, judiciously, below the pepper trees behind the church. He approaches from half a block away where he has been standing on a stoep, smoking his pipe, his attitude disclaiming all relationship with the shining Chrysler; and he helps me to load in my wares, but his heart isn’t in it.
‘Can you stop at Anna’s place first?’ I ask.
Jeremiah grunts and moves in behind the wheel, perched on the small worn velvet cushion he has to sit on to see over the dashboard. As we drive through the streets the many people clustered on corners and sidewalks stare apprehensively at us; we are like a black omen, a shudder of conscience moving through the town, and Jeremiah is mortified by it. Once we have left the town behind he accelerates. I’m sure he has never driven so fast before and I get the impression that he is just waiting for me to comment on it; but I deprive him of that satisfaction. Now our progress is monitored by ostriches. Along all the fences that line the long straight road they are gathered, necks outstretched, their long-lashed fashion model’s eyes blinking, the white-tipped wings of the males lightly spread, ruffled by the wind of our passing. We know, those eyes proclaim, oh yes, we know, we know, but we’re not going to tell.
Casper, as I should have anticipated, isn’t home; and Anna hasn’t heard anything yet. But she insists I must come in for lunch. Jeremiah wanders off on his own, and as Anna and I go into the house I see him squatting down on his haunches near the chicken run, making it quite clear that human contact, which I suspect he regards at the best of times with less than enthusiasm, is the last of his needs right now.
It is an unusually subdued Casper who comes in just after Anna and I have sat down at the table (the children, commendably obedient for once, are eating in the kitchen); I have not even heard him arrive. I suspect he hasn’t noticed the hearse under the bluegums behind the house, because he stops when he sees me, his attitude more diffident than hostile.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.
‘Just sharing some women’s secrets.’
His eyes have a guarded, warning look. ‘Like what?’
‘Nothing,’ says Anna, raising her face to be kissed, but he doesn’t notice. ‘It’s not important.’
‘Of course it’s important,’ I cut in, annoyed at her meekness; then look him in the eyes. �
�Only it’s not your business.’
His eyes narrow slightly. ‘I see.’
Anna hastily changes the subject. ‘What happened in the township, Casper? Kristien told me –’
‘Where did you hear about it?’ he asks accusingly.
‘I was in town. What became of the farmer? Who was he? Did he get away?’
‘It’s war now,’ he says in a strained voice; there is a whiteness round his mouth. I find his stillness more frightening than his explosions.
‘Did they kill him?’ I insist.
‘No.’ He shakes his head and pulls out the chair at the head of the table, sits down heavily. ‘No, he got away all right.’ He looks at Anna. ‘It’s Victor Henning. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now they’ve gone and done this. Bloody savages. I wanted to take my men in. But can you believe it? The army has drawn a cordon round the township, won’t let anybody near. When it comes to protecting us, they look the other way. But I warned them. I told them –’
‘How did the man escape?’ I interrupt him; he’s been talking more to himself than to us.
For a moment he looks at me, uncomprehending.
‘The man – what did you say his name was? – Henning – you said he got away. How? I thought it happened in the middle of the township?’
‘It did. At the little supermarket they’ve got there. Burnt the whole place down.’
‘The shop too?’
‘Yes. What else do you expect?’
‘But I thought it was a black shop?’
‘Probably suspected the owner of being an informer or a sell-out or something.’
‘What would you do if you found an informer in your gang?’
‘Kristien, please.’ From Anna.
I take a deep breath. ‘Just asking. Now tell us how Henning got away.’
He pulls up his heavy shoulders, avoiding my eyes.
‘Did the police come in?’ asks Anna.
‘Of course not. They’re too shit-scared to risk it in there.’ At last he faces me. ‘They say a black family took him in. Hid him till it was all over.’
