by John Coetzee
After lunch I saw Uncle Bert going into his greenhouse, where he stayed for a while, tending to his plants. When he came out again I innocently remarked, “I see some people are camping on the other side of the dam now, Uncle Bert. I wonder who they are.”
He looked so startled that he nearly dropped the watering can he was holding, and his voice sounded like a blunt saw cutting into a hard piece of wood when he spoke. “What have you been doing over there?”
His aggressive attitude nearly bowled me over. “I just went for a walk and I happened to see two people over on that side, Uncle Bert.”
The little blue veins running across his temples swelled up, and sparks of anger flashed in his eyes. “I don’t want you going there again, see!”
“I didn’t talk to them at all, Uncle Bert,” I said, quite rattled. “I was just walking around there and I wondered about them, that’s all.”
“Well, just stay away from there, see,” he said even more gruffly and stomped across the lawn and into to the garage, where he slammed the door shut behind him.
His sudden outburst really had me stumped. Surely I hadn’t done anything wrong by taking that walk with Sipho and coming across two campers who seemed to be minding their own business. After simmering down somewhat, I went into my room and lay down on the bed; after a while, I decided to go and speak to Sipho again. My mom didn’t seem to mind when I told her where I was going; in fact, she sounded pleased that I had found a friend so quickly.
Sipho’s house looked well kept, and the lawn was neatly trimmed. A little white and brown Jack Russell came charging at me, yapping frantically as I walked up the driveway. Before I had even had a chance to knock on the door it was opened and a short, chubby man who looked almost exactly like Sipho stood peering at me closely through a pair of round specs that were like Sipho’s.
I greeted him politely and asked if I could see Sipho.
“He has gone out with his mother. Who shall I say called?” he said in a crisp, business-like voice.
“I’m Rick Williams. I met Sipho at the dam this morning.”
“I’ll tell Sipho when he comes back this afternoon. Will he know where to find you?”
I pointed to the one of the rusty corrugated iron roofs standing out from behind a clump of thorn trees. I immediately noticed Mr Khumalo frowning just like his son had done earlier on, his specs also sliding a little way down his nose, so that he had to push them all the way back up again. Clearing his throat, he looked slightly embarrassed when he spoke again. “All right, I’ll tell Sipho you called.”
Well, it didn’t look as if Uncle Bert was very popular with Sipho’s father either, I thought while walking back towards the gate, and I couldn’t help wondering why. Was it because of Uncle Bert’s peculiar ideas? Or was there something else he was doing what he shouldn’t be doing?
I looked at my watch and saw that it was too early to go back to the cottage right then and, since I had nothing much else to do, I decided to have another peep at the gypsies to try and find out a bit more about them. And, more specifically, I also wanted to find out more about the girl that I couldn’t get out of my mind ever since I had seen her coming out of the water. She had really blown me away, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to rest until I had found out who she was and what she and that man were doing over there.
As I approached the camping place I made a slight detour up to the ruin of the old homestead, so as not to be seen. I was also secretly hoping there would be some nuts on the old walnut tree, but when I got close to it I saw, to my disappointment, that it had been stripped bare. I made my way to the back of one of the higher walls and was surprised to see a strange-looking structure made from angle iron, with a metal chimney standing in the middle of it. And right next to the structure lay a heap of coal. Could the gypsies be building some kind of a house for themselves, I wondered.
A moment later, I heard a girl singing softly and as her voice became louder, I realised she was coming straight in my direction. I quickly ducked behind an old pomegranate bush nearby and saw her walking along, carrying the same heavy bucket I had seen her with before. Again, she was wearing that shiny black swimsuit hugging her curves and making her look absolutely dazzling. She reminded me of a sleek seal I had once seen on the rocks when my mom had taken Susie and me on holiday a long time ago somewhere along the coast of KwaZulu-Natal.
Peeping through the foliage of the bush, I watched her making her way towards a row of large, transparent containers, some of which had greenish water in them. She poured the bucket full of green water from the dam into one of the containers and walked back along the same path she had come on, still singing the same song in that strange language. I waited for quite a while in the same spot to see if she would come again, but there was no further sign of her.
It was only a while later, when a flock of snow-white cattle egrets came flying over from the power station on the other side of the dam, that I realised it was almost sunset already and time to go back to the cottage. But as I turned around to go, I heard the sounds of a guitar-like instrument and the voice of the girl again, singing in her strange language. Then I heard a series of rapid clackity-clackity-trrr-clackity sounds. Curious to find out what was causing them, I quickly retraced my steps and came to a bush-covered spot quite close to the camping place and hid there so that I couldn’t be seen.
To my amazement, the girl, who now had a bright orange and yellow dress on and her jet-black hair tied back with a red ribbon, was dancing to the lively rhythm of the stringed instrument the man was playing. As she swung gracefully from side to side, the clacking sounds could be heard again, and only then did I realise that they were coming from a pair of castanets she was rapidly tapping on with the fingers of each hand. She kept doing that lively dance until I could see sweat shining on her forehead. At last she flung herself down on the grass next to the man, who had by then begun to pluck the strings more slowly.
After a while the girl got up and disappeared behind the caravan; when she reappeared, I was astonished to see a glistening python, I guess about three metres long, draped over her shoulders. She held the snake with both arms outstretched on either side of her and walked around the camping area for quite a while.
So the fellow in Sipho’s class hadn’t been talking rubbish after all, I thought as I watched her; when she came close to the place where I was hiding I could clearly see the whitish markings on the creature’s skin. I was fascinated and scared all at the same time – I have never been attracted to snakes of any kind.
As she came still closer to me, I thought she was going to see me but she started to walk away again. It was then, in the rays of the setting sun, that I saw the glint of a gold earring with a pearl in it in her right earlobe. And as she turned to make her way around a flowering shrub, I saw that the lobe of her left ear was bare. I knew then that she had to be the owner of the earring, and probably also of the pair of pink slippers I had found in the wardrobe in my room. I waited until she and the snake were far enough from me, then I hurried back to the cottage, feeling thoroughly confused. I was glad to find that my mother wasn’t unduly worried about my being home so late, and while stirring the pot of soup on the stove, she casually said, “So, what was it like at Sipho’s place, Rick?”
I didn’t want to let her know where I had just come from in case she spilled the beans to Uncle Bert, which would mean that I could get into big trouble with him, so I just said: “It was okay thanks, Mom.” And to stop her from asking any more questions, I immediately headed for the bathroom and called over my shoulder: “I’m going to have a shower, Mom.”
“Well, please don’t be long, Rick,” she called back. “Supper’s nearly ready.”
Scrubbing myself from head to toe, my mind racing, I struggled to sort out my thoughts. If the pearl earring I had found happened to belong to the girl, how did it get to be there in the first place? And that applied to the pink slippers too. What had she been doing in Uncle Bert’s cottage? I
wondered. And why does she throw buckets of green water from the dam into those green containers in the overgrown garden of the old house? And another thing – why does a beautiful girl like that walk around with a snake draped over her? None of it made any sense to me.
When I got back to my bedroom, I opened the drawer of the bedside table and looked closely at the earring to convince myself again that it was the same as the earring I had seen the girl wearing. There was no doubt about it. I put it back in the drawer, finished dressing and went to the small dining room when my mom called me to come for supper.
“You’re very quiet, Rick. Are you all right?” she said, sounding a bit worried.
“No, everything’s fine, Mom.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and fortunately she didn’t pursue the matter any further.
Chapter 3
I was glad when Sipho turned up at the cottage later the following morning and announced: “My father told me you came over to see me yesterday afternoon, Rick. Is everything okay?”
I took him outside so that my mom or Susie wouldn’t overhear us talking. “I wanted you to come with me to the other side of the dam again. But seeing that you weren’t home, I went alone and guess what, Sipho. Those gypsies are up to some strange things,” I said and proceeded to tell him about how I had seen the girl doing a strange dance and then walking around the place with a python hanging over her shoulders, after she had emptied buckets full of green water into the row of containers next to the ruins of the old farmhouse. But I left out the part about the earring and the pink slippers, because it didn’t really concern him anyway.
Sipho rubbed his chin very thoughtfully and suddenly said: “How do you know they’re gypsies?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “After what I’ve just told you, what else can they be?”
“Well, even if they are gypsies, what does it matter? I’ve been browsing around about gypsies on the Internet and I’ve changed my mind about them,” he said in his usual steady tones.
“What do you mean, Sipho?”
“Gypsies have been in Europe for many centuries. Occasionally some of them have made themselves unpopular for trespassing on people’s land and sometimes stealing chickens and things from farms, but they’re certainly not dangerous. Actually, according to the article I found on the Internet, they have their own sets of laws and follow a very strict moral code.”
“Carry on,” I said when he stopped talking.
“If you’re interested, you can look it up yourself, Rick.”
“I don’t have a computer, and my uncle won’t let me use his,” I said glumly.
“Well, gypsies are not nearly as bad as people have been making them out to be, Rick. Just because they live in closely knit communities and don’t accept the laws of the countries they happen to be in, they’ve been persecuted for many centuries. It hardly seems fair, does it?”
“Well, anyway, after what I saw, I’m sure those people on the other side of the dam are real gypsies,” I said.
Sipho cleared his throat and uttered some words that sounded peculiar to my ears: ‘Audi alterem partem.’
“Come again, Sipho!”
He smiled while giving me a superior kind of look. “That’s an expression my mother sometimes uses from her Law studies. It’s Latin that lawyers use in court. It means: ‘Hear the other side’.”
Noticing the blank look that must have spread over on my face, he continued.
“In other words, don’t judge others until you hear their side of the story, see!”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “But I’d also like to know what they’re building next to one of the walls of the old farmhouse.”
Sipho gave me a blank look then and so I told him about the strange-looking angle-iron structure and the longish chimney I had seen there.
“Yes, that does sound a bit odd,” he said. “But maybe it’s just some kind of braai they’re building. Or maybe a burner for smoking biltong.”
“I don’t think so, Sipho. Surely people use wood for that – not coal,” I said, remembering the big heap of it I saw lying close to the structure. Then I noticed a sudden gleam in Sipho’s eye. “Hey, iron structure? Chimney? Coal? Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Rick?”
“You mean that maybe my uncle’s got something to do with those people, Sipho?”
“Precisely,” he said, and again I saw deep lines appearing on his forehead. “Look, Rick. I don’t know how to say this, but that uncle of yours has been doing strange things for a long time.”
“I hope it’s not something… er… illegal.”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you about this, Rick, but…”
I got really inquisitive then. “Go on, Sipho.”
“Well, a few times lately I’ve heard my father talking to my mother about your Uncle Bert. He said your uncle is always so busy with other things that he is not concentrating properly on his work at the power station. And that could lead to some big trouble one day,” he said frowning.
“Like what, Sipho?”
His specs slipped down his nose again while he stood, head bowed and thinking deeply for a while before replying. “Now don’t go telling anyone about this, Rick, because it’s highly confidential. When the previous manager retired and my father took over from him six months ago, he found that the power station hadn’t been looked after properly for a long time and that it was becoming dangerous to keep it running the way it was. Because it’s one of the oldest power stations in the country, the top management of the power company had wanted to close it down, but my father convinced them he would get it running smoothly again. All the staff have been working together very well since my father took over, and things have been improving greatly since then. But apparently your Uncle Bert just hasn’t been doing his work properly and some technical problems have cropped up during some of the shifts when he’s been on duty.”
“Carry on, Sipho,” I said impatiently when he stopped talking again.
“Well, my father says your uncle has been given some written warnings already and that he’ll be in serious trouble if something goes wrong again when he’s in charge of a shift. As a matter of fact, he could even cause something big in the power station to blow up one day, my father said. And if that happens, of course, everybody around here would be without jobs, and Ashby would become a ghost town.”
That really shook me, and some terrifying thoughts came flooding into my head. What would happen to my mom, Susie and me then? We’d have no place to stay and nobody else to turn to!
I saw Sipho suddenly looking at me in a puzzled sort of way. “Hey, you look as if the whole world has fallen on your head! Don’t take it so seriously, man. I didn’t want to scare you with what I said … I mean… something that drastic might not ever actually happen at all. To tell you the truth, I’m just treating the whole thing like a detective does. To find things out by observation and reasoning, you know.”
“Kind of like a private detective?” I said.
He gave me a broad dolphin-like smile. “Something like that, yes. I suppose you also enjoy reading whodunit stories, Rick?”
I nodded. “I suppose so.”
“Okay then, let’s treat the whole thing like detectives do. And, of course, we must keep everything we saw and heard strictly to ourselves until we’re absolutely sure of the truth,” he warned.
I didn’t actually like the idea of the two of us secretly spying on my Uncle Bert, but I agreed anyway. “All right, Sipho, but I think we’ll have to talk a lot quieter in future when we’re close to my uncle’s cottage; Susie seems to be hearing a lot of things she shouldn’t be hearing. And what she does hear really scares the hell out of her,” I added.
“Okay, I’ll remember that, Rick. Ciao for now,” he said in a businesslike way that reminded me of his dad, and went on home to his parents’ place. Then I saw Uncle Bert’s neighbour, Mr Powell, peering over the hedge again, and I could only hope he hadn’t heard some of the things Sipho had
told me about my uncle.
“Who were you talking to, Rick?” my mom asked when I went back into the cottage.
I nearly froze. “It was only Sipho, Mom.”
“He sounded so serious. Anything wrong, Rick?”
“No, Mom. We were just talking about all kinds of things in general, that’s all.”
“I thought I heard him saying something about Uncle Bert.”
“You must have been mistaken, Mom,” I tried to convince her, but she didn’t seem to believe me.
Just then Susie let the cat out of the bag. She was outside the front door of the cottage, talking loudly to her doll. “Don’t worry, Polly, the gas from the greenhouse isn’t going to ’stroy the world anymore, see. And Uncle Bertie isn’t going to blow up the pow-wowa station like Sipho said he was going to do. Everything’s going to be okay, see, Polly. Everything’s going to be…” Her voice suddenly broke into a series of wet little sobs. “Oh, it’s not going to be okay, Polly! Sipho said Uncle Bertie is going to blow up the pow-wowa station, and then what’ll happen…”
“What on earth did Sipho say, Rick?” my mom wanted to know.
I threw my hands up. “Susie’s just imagining things again, Mom.”
“It didn’t sound like that to me, Rick.”
“Oh, Mom, please!”
“I don’t want you to scare Susie like that, Rick,” she said wearily. “Things are difficult enough as they are. Do me a favour and say something to your sister to calm her down, will you?”
Still stinging from the unfairness of my mom’s accusations, I racked my brain for smart comeback but then I thought, oh hell, what’s the use! I hurried outside and took Susie by the hand. Walking to the end of the garden with her, I did my best to speak as smoothly as I could. “You tell Polly nothing like that’s going to happen, Susie. Nothing at all, see, because it won’t.”
