by Isla Morley
“Aikona, madam. No trouble. I’ll be back chop-chop.” She grins, and I notice she is missing all her front teeth. Delia is not a beautiful woman, nor is she young. Her fierce face has sunken cheeks and her small black button eyes are set too close to her wide, flat nose. She wears a doek, which covers her hair, and I can’t decide if she looks more like a pirate or a warrior. Her skinny frame recedes from me, seesawing with a limp. Looking down past the hem of her dress, I notice how her right foot drags a black boot with a two-inch platformed sole.
The back of the Bredenkamps’ property is interspersed with aloes, pelargonium, and vygies. Africa is aromatic this morning—a cross between bush tea, thyme, and cat pee. The Cape canaries call to one another from their lofty perches in the Port Jackson trees, the piet-my-vrous joining in the chorus. It is good to be back; fancy that.
I fetch a glass from the cupboard, fill it up with water from the tap at the sink, and return to my backyard throne just in time to hear Delia’s “Helloo, madam!” Setting down the laden tray on the seat, she tch-tches, “Madam must eat. Madam is too skinny. Not good for a woman in Africa to be so skinny.” There is a bowl of granola, a banana, a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, triangles of toast, and a mug of tea with a picture of Charles and Diana on it. Don’t these people throw anything away? From the pocket of her apron, she extracts two apricots, “from Ou Miss Antjie’s tree,” she tells me, referring to Susannah’s mother. “She says the apricots are not for the family, but I pick them anyway when she’s not looking!”
“What does she do with them if you aren’t allowed to eat them?” I ask.
“The Ou Miss gives them to the kleintjies at the children center. She only goes every other Tuesday, and then she has me or the boy pick them.”
“The boy?”
“Pepsi. He’s a skelm, that one.” By way of an explanation for calling him a scoundrel, she says, “Too many girlfriends, too much gambling. Too much fighting. I keep telling madam that the Boss should send him away,” she says, clicking her disapproval once more.
“The gardener?” I ask.
“Ewe.” She nods. “He works here Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, but he is very lazy. Ow.”
Sometimes it seems that nothing changes in Africa. Delia has been a voting member of society since 1994, her political party goes on unchallenged more than a dozen years later, yet she serves me toast with the crusts cut off and uses the vernacular of the apartheid era with her talk of “the boy” and “the Boss.”
“Thank you for the apricots,” I say, and eat a perfect triangle. “Do you think it would be all right to use the phone?” I have forgotten the place where I am to meet Piet Slabbert.
She squints at me, mops her perspiring face with the dish towel she has draped over her shoulder. “Yes, madam.”
“Please do not call me ‘madam,’ Delia. It makes me feel old,” I lie. It makes me feel white, is what it really is. “Everyone calls me Abbe.”
She shakes her head and mutters something in Xhosa.
“Excuse me, I think I will eat inside,” I say, and pick up my tray and make my retreat from her disapproving frown.
KONSTANTIA KOMBUIS, the restaurant where Piet and I have arranged to meet for lunch, is set off the beaten cuisine path of downtown Paarl with its jazzy eateries, art stores, and gift shops. Rather, Drosty Street has a row of Cape Dutch homes, most of them converted to small businesses. One of them is this slightly decrepit café—its thatched roof worn, the shutters shedding their bottle-green paint, and its austere dining room empty. Instead of boasting the region’s finest KWV wines like its more frequented counterparts on Main Street, it offers a special on Windhoek lager. I order a shandy and take in the decor, which is a mishmash of French colonial and tribal hut. Before long Piet breezes in wearing coveralls, a backpack slung over his shoulder, and a lit cigarette perched on his lower lip in defiance of the anti-smoking ban. The restaurant manager claps his back and says, “Piet! Jou blerrie skilpad! At your age you can’t afford to keep such a beautiful woman waiting!”
“Luister, ou pal, instead of reminding me of my age, why don’t you make yourself useful and pour me a cup of coffee—or has it been so long since you’ve had a customer that you’ve forgotten how to serve one?” he volleys back, winking at me.
When he approaches our table he is scowling as the smoke hits his eyes. “Abbe! What a pleasure to see you,” he says, removing the cigarette from his mouth so he can kiss the back of my hand. “So long; too long.”
“You still look exactly the same,” I say, and he does, apart from the liver spots dotting his bald head and the mustache that is now white and thinning at the corners.
“And look at you, all grown up; pragtig nes soos jou ma,” he says. People who knew my parents always thought my features favored my father’s, but I take his compliment that I am pretty like my mother without argument.
We order the specialty of the day—kudu kebobs—and he pulls from his backpack a folder with the offer from the firm, five percent more than asking price, which Piet says he set deliberately high. They hope to finish construction of the resort before the winter rains next year, he tells me. A win-win, Piet concludes his report.
“I heard the local council members aren’t too happy about the idea of another big resort,” I say.
“Ja nee,” he confirms. “It’s going to be competition for all the local establishments, but progress is progress. And none of those people who are so unhappy about this deal are offering to buy the place, so there you are.” He drains his second cup of coffee. “Rhiaan still on board?”
I nod. “He has wanted to sell the farm for years. I was the one who wanted to hang on to it—you know, in case . . .” In case what? In case I ever stopped running away and returned? In case my mother was right—that it would all still be here waiting for me when I came back?
Piet leans over and holds my hand. “It was your home, I understand.” After the waiter has set down our entrées, he says, “Perhaps we should take a drive out to the farm first, before you sign the papers, and clear the air, so to speak. After all, we’re talking about your home.”
“It was never my home,” I protest.
“Ag, skat, but it is where you left your heart, nê?”
Whether or not this is true, it is still not a good idea to visit the farm. There is a deal to make, papers to sign. Maybe afterward, when the land with its withered fruit trees is the site of the Kabbeljou Resort, I can visit. When all the ghosts have been evicted. “I need the money, Piet, and I mean in the food-on-the-table sense. I don’t want any nostalgia trips cluttering this decision. Let’s just do it; the sooner the better.”
“Yes, of course.” Piet goes over the contract, the estimated settlement statement, the government transfer charges and the tax implications. The final number, after all the required adjustments, is staggering even when you divide by two.
He finishes his food in a dozen mouthfuls and lights a cigarette. “There is just one small matter to clear up, which, hopefully, can be accomplished by the buyer’s deadline.”
“What’s that?”
“The school.” Although initially supposed to educate twenty elementary-aged black children, the farm is now schooling forty, half of whom are staying on the property. Nobody quite has the answer for the number of children orphaned from AIDS, or the matter that nobody wants to go to school with kids who are infected. These little start-up schools pop up on farms and church properties everywhere, modest projects of the well-intentioned. But before you know it, there is twice, thrice the number of kids expected. “Quite frankly,” Piet continues, “I am pleased we are going to be out from under the burden of liability.” Piet goes on to explain that there is a state-sponsored orphanage closer to Cape Town that can take a few of the children, and he is hoping the Catholics might be able to do something about the rest. Suddenly the euphoria of inheriting a small fortune is sanded down by the realization that for some, for many, there is no relief, neither from poverty nor a
n early grave. What is to become of children without mothers, without teachers?
“What if I talk to Rhiaan and see about taking some of the money from the sale and establishing a trust? Something that can provide scholarships for a few of these children.”
“That would be very generous indeed, Abbe. But you are not responsible for these kids, you know. You and your brother have already been more than generous, letting them use the farm.”
“I wouldn’t call it generous—we both know that no one else wanted anything to do with the place. But a scholarship fund—that’s something my grandmother would have approved of.”
“Indeed,” he agrees.
“So when do I sign the papers?”
“Nine o’clock on Thursday morning we will meet with the developer and his attorneys at my office. After that we can go see Mr. Lam at the bank and get him to do the international transfer of funds and talk to him about establishing a trust fund, if that’s what you and your boet want to do.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Piet.”
“Ag, my blommetjie, this is the least I can do. You have been through so much; if this relieves a bit of the suffering, I am honored to have had a part in it.”
By the time we walk outside, the morning mist has dispersed, leaving the sun quite chipper. Holding open the door of his old Mercedes for me to get in, he says, “What say you we take a drive past your old house before I take you back to the Bredenkamps’?”
THERE IS NOT MUCH ACTIVITY on Vitry Lane this afternoon except for the African monarchs darting along carefully groomed flower hedges, playing leapfrog with one another. Lining the newly paved street with its blinding pedestrian crossings are postcard-perfect houses. Some are new constructions made to look a hundred years old, and some of the grand old ladies have been dolled up with modern amenities. The Mercedes comes to a stop in front of one of the few plain-Jane houses that couldn’t care less about curb appeal. It takes a moment to realize that this is the house, our house. The yard has shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, and is dominated by the azalea bushes. The tree from which my father once hung one of his old truck tires in a zesty moment of paternal goodwill is gone. And instead of my mother’s familiar silhoutte, there is an old lady watering her flower beds with a hose. Is it too late to say goodbye?
IT WAS NOT a teary farewell, at least not for me. Or for Cindy Meyers, who insisted on carrying my suitcase and blowing huge gum bubbles till my grandmother requested she kindly stop. “You are oh-so-lucky,” Cindy said. “American guys are so cute.” My grandmother, who had driven us to the airport, said to keep my head on the books, not the boys. “Do us proud, my girl,” she insisted, and seemed somewhat confident I would.
Only my mother cried a little, but I did not think she had the right. She had given up the right to cry over me the way she had given up the need for depending on me. After I discovered the bread and its secret bottle, I realized it was its contents that my mother needed. I wasn’t a fool. I knew it was on Beauty’s witch-doctor remedies—her drugs—my mother now depended, just as she had once done on Gordon’s dry gin. It helped explain why when each time I saw my mother it was as though she thought her edges were more clearly defined. As though she were emerging from the background of a diluted watercolor and taking the position an artist will reserve for the subject.
Nevertheless, things dead center often cannot perceive what is going on around them. My mother, for instance, seemed not to know that just one word from her would keep me from venturing any closer to the departure gate of DF Malan Airport. She seemed not to know that my application to the student foreign exchange program had been a bluff, that what I wanted her to know (I could find my own way in the world even if it led me thousands of miles from her doorstep) was really about what I wanted her to feel, that is to say: bad. Bad enough to beg me to stay, to cough up all her secrets and to keep her promises. All she did, however, was hug me the way she used to when I was a gangly kid who had grazed her knee. She lingered so long in that embrace, sniffing through her proud tears, that I thought for sure those words, Don’t go, would come. Instead, she called my bluff, dusted my jacket, and waved me off with one clearly drawn hand.
“I love you, Abbe-girl,” she yelled. “I love you.” I did not turn back, a decision I regretted before the airplane’s wheels had left the tarmac.
By the time the airplane had made its ascent above the mountains of Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, I couldn’t quite recall my mother’s features. I snapped open my diary to the picture lodged among its pages: my brother and my father behind us, my mother and me seated in the front. Instead of her face, I looked at my foot hooked around her leg to keep me from falling off her lap and beyond her grasp. How had it become unhooked?
MY MOTHER FOUND my father dead on the kitchen floor when she got home from the airport, but it took almost two days of flying before I landed in California and heard the news from my new “host parents.” I called her as soon as we reached the house, expecting to hear a frayed-nerves-mother talk of coming home.
“His liver shut down,” she explained, dry as a bone. “The doctor said it is common for people who drink as much as your father did.”
Even in the absence of any bereavement, hers or mine, what plagued me was a question for which there was no answer: Why now?
“He didn’t look like he suffered much,” she said, mistaking my silence for grief. “He was curled up on the floor as though he needed to take a nap.” So my father’s last gasp, then, was in the gleaming kitchen where a fire once burned and a table once splintered. “Sweetheart, are you okay?”
“What about the funeral?” I replied.
“Oh, there isn’t going to be a funeral—your father didn’t want one. We are just going to bury him on Saturday and go over to Muriel’s for a small reception.” As though she were reading my mind, she continued, “Listen to me now: you didn’t go all the way to America just to turn around and come back. Not for something like this. No, we all think it best that you do your thing.”
I would have argued, especially when she said Rhiaan was already on his way home, if she had not started coughing. “Asthma acting up again.” She wheezed. “Every time the apricot tree starts budding.” Except it was not her usual dry hack that heralded spring but something more resinous. “It’s no way to start off your adventure, sweetheart, but you make the best of it,” she spluttered. “I know you are going to do us all proud. We are all going to be all right now. And everything will all still be here when you get back.”
And that was that. My father was dead and my mother was having high hopes.
“WANT TO GET OUT?” Piet asks, but I shake my head. Instead, I roll down the window and wave shyly to the lady, who looks at us inquisitively. It is only then that I notice what she is watering: my mother’s old rosebushes, back from the dead, blooming prolifically in the afternoon sun.
“I remember the last time I saw your mother,” Piet says, driving on to the B&B. “She was always a beautiful woman, but the day she came to my office she was a vision. Hell’s bells, she looked like an angel! I couldn’t believe it when Edith called a few weeks later to tell me she had passed away. There was just no telling she was sick to look at her.”
“But she was there about her will; didn’t that strike you as odd?”
He shakes his head. “She didn’t come to see me about her will.”
“What then?”
His eyebrows are raised in surprise, as though I should know. “She came to see me about changing back to her maiden name.”
Piet drops me off at the entrance to the Bredenkamps’ property and I walk up the driveway. Delia is hobbling ahead of me with a bag of groceries on top of her head.
“Hello, Delia,” I call.
“Hello, madam,” she replies, pausing long enough for me to catch up. “Madam Susannah sent me to the shop to get some things for your kitchen.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have gone to any trouble, but thank you—that’s very ki
nd.” I unlock the padlock and let Delia enter the kaia first so she can relieve herself of her bundle. As she unpacks the groceries, I chat away as though she might be Jenny. What I want to talk about is why my mother would revert to her maiden name only a month before she died. Was she somehow divorcing my decomposing father in his bed of soil still freshly turned? Was she reclaiming her lost independence and trying to find her way back to someone she used to be? Instead, I talk about being back. “Paarl has changed a lot since I last lived here,” I tell her.
She hums in agreement. “Ewe, but too much is still the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Many of our young ones are skelms, and the old people in the townships are scared of them. They steal from you, and if you try to stop them, sshck!” With her forefinger she draws an imaginary line across her neck.
“But what about the police?”
She shakes her head. “Some of them are the police.”
And then, when I think I have heard it all, she says, “Sometimes I think it is worse than before. There are too many guns now, and too much of the AIDS. It was not like that before.” It seems then that Africa will always be struggling, suffering, weighed down if no longer by imperial power, then by disease or crime or famine. “Money, money, money,” she continues. “Everyone thinks money is going to make life better. Everybody wants to win the Lotto and be happy, but ow, money can only bring more sadness to one who is sick in the heart.” By way of example, she tells me how Karel van der Walt’s wife, Lavinia, won five thousand rand in last month’s drawing; money quickly spent on a shiny pink couch. “Everyone knows Boss Karel cannot say boo to a goose,” Delia says, “but the money made him crazy.” Apparently, having discovered his battered old La-Z-Boy sent to the dump, Karel raised his hand to strike his wife of thirty-three years for spending money he had set aside for a big-screen TV. None of this would be known had it not been for the domestic, who, while ironing, witnessed her madam deliver a surprisingly hard blow to Karel’s gut. All evidence, by Delia’s account, that the love of money made everyone crazy—black and white.
